Finally Getting to the Guest Room

I have a secret that I'm not proud of. It's called my guest room.

That picture was actually taken after we had already removed everything from the floor, so in the interest of full disclose, it's looking pretty good there.

It had been in that state for quite some time. When people came over, we shut the door and never spoke of it. The room happens to share a wall with the bathroom, and after replacing the electrical wiring, adding lights, and various other projects that required cutting a hole in the wall, it wound up being more patches than anything else, some of which were our first attempts at drywalling. Let's just say they weren't our best work. So, after replacing the water lines called for another hole, David decided we would simply tear out almost the whole wall and replace it with one large piece of drywall. Then we lost motivation.

And so the room sat there, wall partially torn out, for months. As the days passed, junk naturally started piling up. We both finally got sick of it and decided it was high time to do something about the mess, and called in some volunteer reinforcements.

We started by drawing a chalk line across the top where we wanted to cut. We didn't go all the way to the ceiling, because corners are a pain and the drywall above that point was still in good shape.

While removing the wall, we ran into some annoying wire mesh in the corner. David solved the problem by using some tin snips to cut it out all down the corner of the wall. It worked surprisingly well.

Another problem our weird, old house posed was that our drywall is extra thick. In the past, we've just used two sheets of drywall, stacked. It's always been annoying, and when doing a larger wall, it meant we would have had to buy more drywall, instead of using what we already have. David came up with idea of buying some cheap 1/8" plywood and cutting it into strips, which we attached to the studs with a nail gun to build them out.

This would have worked flawlessly, had all the studs been even close to the same depth. Oh, the joys of living in an older home!

After fiddling around with multiple layers of plywood, we finally got it sorted out.

Then we just installed standard 1/2" drywall on top of our new, thicker, wall to match the depth of what was already there. (In case anyone is wondering, the drywall is green because it is mold and mildew resistant. It's what we used in the basement, so since we already had it on hand, we went with it.)

We had hoped to apply the first coat of drywall mud, but we found we had only a tiny amount left, and since it was after 8, we decided to call it a night.

Tomorrow will bring mudding! My least favourite part of drywalling. Hopefully, it will also bring painting and trim re-application and calling this project done, but with so much drying time factored in, I'm not sure that will happen.