And I thought drywalling was hard!

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

Bill Howatt

Very interesting.

When I did my addition, the smartest thing I did was to get a pro to drywall it. I can do it but it takes me forever and still isn't as good as the pro did in a short time.

Back in the 50s my father worked at a concrete products building supply company and while I can't remember the details there seemed to be a lot of negativity about the becoming popular drywall compared to lathe and plaster. Well, we know which one won the battle for standard dwellings. I guess a compromise is using a skim coat over drywall.

Bill

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

Don Stephan

Our house was built in the 1920's. Some of the studs used were so crooked they were sawn through the wide dimension 3", forced straight until they cracked lengthwise several inches, and nailed in place. Wood lathe bridging all the studs evened out some of the non-parallel studs, land three coats of plaster left the wall surface perfectly planar. Plus, a plaster skim coat is smoother than even a skim coat of drywall mud. But no comparison on cost.

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

GolfSteve in Calgary

Fun to watch. I've never seen framing cross-bracing done like that before (each brace angled to the next). My house was built in 1972. Studs are 16" on centre. Work done by tradesmen (the main floor) did not have any cross bracing. Some of the framing is terrible. The finish carpenter who covered up the framing errors with only 1-1/4" mahogany trim was a master.

The basement was framed by my Dad. 16" on center with horizontal cross bracing. Done pretty well, but he used the cheapest studs he could find; most studs have live bark and wane edges.

New houses around here seem to use 24" stud spacing, and there absolutely no attention paid to bowing of the wall and crooked studs.

The flag at 18:00 looks like Canada's old Red Ensign flag.

I used to work in China and got to watch Chinese trades plaster brick walls. Amazing how they got such smooth surfaces - but within a few years the plaster was cracked and peeling.

Look at that chicken mansion at 1:54  !

GolfSteve in Calgary

Just for fun...here's a picture of me feeding the chickens at my grandparent's farm about 1977. This was the small chicken coop. A far cry from the chicken mansion in the video!

This is a picture of me the day I got in trouble for riding the pigs. The medium sized chicken coop is in the background. There was a third chicken coop that was larger. All of them were basic shacks completely enclosed in chicken wire....as much to keep the skunks and weasels out as to keep the chickens in.

My baba recalled a skunk getting into the chicken coop one night. It killed about 30 chickens but only ate the heart out of each one! I also recall walking the fields one day and seeing a pack of timber wolves lope along about 500 meters away. They were huge! The coyotes would howl almost every night, and you would occasionally see black bears.

The chickens were free range - which helped a lot to keep the wood ticks under control. Each night the chickens mostly returned to the coop - my job was to round up the chickens who didn't want to. I would run around with an unbent clothes hanger with a hook formed on the end. I would snag the chicken's foot using the hook and drag it home. This was also how we caught the chickens at slaughter time.

I used to hate getting eggs from under the grouchy hens who refused to move out of the nest!

Re: Look at that chicken mansion at 1:54  !

johnv

And if you were lucky there wasn't a snake under the hen.

Great ... now you've given me a new nightmare !

Re: That was fun-Here's a follow up in woodworking

John Jardin

Alan,

Thanks for the link. I was 1 year old when it was filmed.

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

Barry Irby

About 55 years ago my Dad built a house that had plaster on rock lathes. Early on he had me putting done an attic floor. My foot slipped and I knocked down a 16" square piece of the lathe, and put it back up. You would have thought I destroyed the entire house.

The plasterers came in, looked the place over and plastered the small stuff like the closets on the first day, sort of a warm up. Piddled with it for a few hours. The next day they did the rest of the house. Went at it like Mad Men. At the end of the day they were beat, looked like people who did two triathlons' in one very hot day. They did each of three coats in the same way. Their finish coat was so good Dad did not paint the interior for many years.

Those were some manly men.

When I was building I built a house on five levels. Somehow next to one of the transitions there was a ripple in the drywall. I took the rock down and fiddled with the framing, but the ripple was still there. In a flash of insight, I called a friend who was a plasterer, he came by with a bucket of sheetrock mud and picked up a nice straight stick out of the trash, smeared some mud in the low places and struck it off with the stick and said, There, when that dries sand it lightly and paint it. I had visualized four foot long trowels and darbies.

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

Tom Norton

I have done quite a bit of drywall jobs that required the use of long trowels. Some I have made up using Lexan. Often I have skin coated entire walls to even out the "waves". A lot of work but worth the effort.

But drywall mud is a lot lighter than plaster!

Waves....

Barry Irby

When I was building we had endless complaints about walls that were not perfectly flat or in a plane. I asked my friend the plasterer how in the world did you ever get plaster walls flat?

His answer was, "They never were. It was drywall that started that sh*t" He explained that people were a lot m ore tolerant of slight waves, they expected them and the trim carpenters knew how to deal with them.

Reminds me of another time. I built a house for an engineer who was very particular. It was T shaped and on several levels. The entry was a huge room that opened out into the dining area. It was about 16' by 35', you entered through the 16' end and there was a flight of about five steps that rose into another open room. Just when we were about to install the hardwood floor we realized the room was an inch wider on one end that the other. And we knw the owner would have a heart attack. You would have been able to see the flooring was not parallel to the wall on one side. The hardwood installer walked in at that moment and said "I can fix it". On the narrow end he would pound the H out of the nails and back off as he went along. He was able to pick up about a 1/100" in each course. When he got to the other side it was parallel. He and I were the only ones who ever knew. I paid him a tidy little bonus.

Re: And I thought drywalling was hard!

Don Stephan

The first house I rehabbed had a couple plaster walls on expanded metal with lots of cracks. Seemed easy to take down the cracked plaster and replace with drywall. Kept the existing windows and found that the plaster in places was 1/2" thick against the window frames, in other places 5/8" thick. Wasn't a problem for the plasters because they screeded their plaster to the window frames. Fortunately a friend had seen a similar issue on a remodeling show and shared a tip to cut strips of 20 year 3 tab shingles to shiim out the window opening studs under the drywall.

Re: Look at that chicken mansion at 1:54  !

Jerry Nicholson

"And if you were lucky there wasn't a snake under the hen."

Or a soft shell egg, that feels just like a snake!

With grouchy hens, that wanted to set, I would just grab them by the neck and toss them off the nest. This was all back in the 40s on my grandparents farm.