Builders Share: Hanging Rock

The drywall used for walls taking a coat of veneer plaster is called blue board. It's the same as your typical sheet rock except that the paper cover is specially treated to react chemically with the plaster. This creates a strong bond between the plaster and the drywall. Plaster can be applied to regular sheet rock as well, but it's best to treat it with a bonding agent first.

As far as hanging the drywall, it's best done with help, and when it came time for covering the high ceiling and steeply sloped walls in the master bedroom, I got some. But most people have better things to do than help their friends hang drywall so I felt that if I still wanted friends, I should contract the work out or do it myself, and since I've taken the DIY aesthetic to obsessive levels, I did it myself.

There are two techniques I know of for hanging drywall alone. One is to use a drywall lift. The other is to mount a cleat on the wall for propping up one edge of the sheet while you hold the sheet with one hand and drive in screws with the other. Drywall lifts are available to rent at places like Home Depot, but I wasn't likely to get all the work done quickly enough to make it cost effective to rent one. I used the cleat method along with a few 5 gallon buckets of elbow grease and got the job done. There was only one serious mishap where I was trying to mount a 10' sheet on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway. The cleat did its job but my one hand wasn't enough to keep the sheet from collapsing under its own weight. One large piece of blue board fell to pieces supported by a soundtrack of expletives.

Drywall is usually screwed into place though there are some places where hanging it using roofing nails is accepted. That's the way it was hung before the screw gun came into wide use. I hung mine using 1-1/4" drywall screws and since I didn't have a drywall screw gun, I used my Makita cordless drill with a special bit for counter-sinking the screws. It's important that the screw heads are sunk slightly into the drywall to hide them from the finished surface.

Once the drywall was hung, I covered the joints and the inside corners with fiberglass mesh tape. On the outside corners I tacked fine-mesh corner bead which protects them from damage. The fine mesh type is used especially for veneer plaster applications. Most applications use a regular metal corner bead.

In the places where sloped walls met with vertical, I used a special metal flex tape that has two parallel metal strips sandwiched between paper with a space in the center for making a bend. This tape helps to create a straight corner where there's an odd angle.

The joints and the screws were then all covered with a couple of coats of Durabond 90 jointing compound. This is a setting type compound that comes as powder, is mixed with water, and then sets up in a short time to be super hard. It's stronger than the typical plastic joint compound but it's much harder to sand so isn't usually used as a finish coat. Since I was going to plaster over everything, sanding wasn't an issue.