Sunday, February 27, 2005
Plasterboarding finished upstairs
Finished, finished, finished. The plasterboarding upstairs is finished. What a relief.
Thats 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a couple of corridors/landings, stairs and of course ceilings for each room. It's taken over 130 sheets of plasterboard, 400 m2. It seems to have taken forever, and I'm in no hurry to start again downstairs. The good news is all the doors and windows for each room are fitted, the first fit electrics are finished and it's now time to start plumbing in the bathrooms.
A few things I've learnt from plasterboarding :-
- Square and level - Pay extra attention to getting floors, walls, ceiling, door frames etc. at 90o and parallel and level. Big rectangular plasterboards fit much better into 'square holes'.
- Good quality screws - Cheap plasterboard screws are a false economy. They don't pierce the metal studding easily and tend to tear the paper surface of the plasterboard making filling more time-consuming. Use the supplied screwdriver bit in the box of screws and chuck it away at then end of the box. Use a new one in the next box, suprisingly they do 'wear' and can cause the screw to wobble as it's driven it.
- Buy a Surform - It's invaluable for shaving off very small amounts or removing the bumpy broken edge to give a clean sharp cut edge to the board. I've never had much joy with a Surform on wood, it's intended use, but for plasterboard it's excellent.
- Don't be too exact - especially when working on your own. Cutting to the nearest centimeter is fine and allows a little room for maneuvor if the floor or ceiling is not quite level.
- Chamfered edges - Keep the tapered edges of the board together and on external corners, keep the cut edges for the floor and internal corners. Filling the joints is easier.
- Planning - Take into account the size of the plasterboard. Avoid walls just slightly longer than the width of a board, or a door positioned the width of a board plus a few centimeters from an edge so as to prevent very thin in-fill. The same for ceiling height, make it the length of a board + 1cm to allow for irregularities. Any gap will be covered by skirting board.
| 6:49:51 PM
Plasterboarding techniques hints and tips
