Choose your
drywall-finish
early on

To obtain a good drywall-finish it takes a lot of work. Sometimes drywall texture is applied which is more time consuming. In building our owner/builder home, our contractor was exceptionally fast and his crew finished up in record time.

Drywall-finish is necessary when installing drywall, or wallboard. Sometimes drywall texture is applied to drywall.

A good wallboard contractor can have your drywall put up in a couple days, for a modest 1800 sq ft home. Once the board is up, then the drywall finisher goes to work slapping mud all over the place.

When the drywall is put up, the house is starting to look like a home, and you begin to get the feeling that it is finally coming together. I call it the “feel good” stage of the building process.

The following picture is dark, for which I'm sorry. It does show some of the mud piled in the middle of our family room. Remember that half of the mud has already been used throughout the house.

It took over 1 Ton of mud for our entire house. You can see some of it sitting in the middle of the room in boxes. When the drywall man brought it all in, he said "This represents over a ton of mud, so keep this house warm. You don't want to lose that much mud."

The mud has to be kept warm so if you are “mudding” in the winter, you can figure what has to happen. In our case it was in the winter and so our furnace had to be on, because we didn't have a generator or another heat source.

This picture shows the same room from a different vantage. Note that at every seam of wallboard, the tape has to be "mudded" on so that no holes are seen. All nails have to be covered with mud also. A good drywall finisher will cover everything so you don't see any flaws in his/her work.

Notice how tall the ceilings are in the center. It's about 10 feet, so the drywall man has to do the mudding on stilts. They get so proficient, that walking on the stilts is second nature to them.

You'll note that there are some holes left in the drywall-finish where the electrical and plumbing has to be accessed through. Those areas connecting to the electricity or plumbing are covered by a face plate covering the rough edges. Along the bottom edges a baseboard covers the edge, and at the windows, they are finished up to the windows. A gap of at least one eighth of an inch needs to be left so moisture will not seep into the wallboard from the window. The painter then fills the gap with caulking which gives a finished appearance. Of course, wood trim is put around doors which covers rough edges of the drywall there. drywall tips Another interesting thing to note is that since the insulation had not been blown in the attic of our home before the wallboard was installed, then the heat was escaping straight up, up, up, “right out the roof”. And so our heat bill that month was monstrous.

TIP: Get your drywall-finish done in the spring or fall, before it turns cold. Then you can get the attic insulation in before the cold too.

At this point you could almost paint right now, but when you have the walls textured, the walls and ceilings have to have the texturing put over the surface everywhere.

There are different drywall-finish textures that can be put on the wall, or you can have a plain finish if you want.

Ceilings are often textured too. In our case, we chose the Sante Fe finish on all walls and ceilings, except we didn't antique it when we painted. The drywall man was happy about our choice, because that particular finish hides a lot, even tho it does take more mud. (I'm sure they like that too, if they are supplying the materials)

A step by step guide to building your own free home

drywall-finish
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Choose your drywall-finish early on

Choose your
drywall-finish
early on