DIY Drywall Part 3 | Drywall Cutting and Installing For Beginners!

hey I'm Jeff from home renovation DIY thanks for joining us today we're here to talk about drywall measuring cutting and installation techniques a bunch of tips and tricks that will help you to do this job a lot easier and if you're joining us from the last video we talked about all things drywall about prepping and getting organized now it's basically step two right we're gonna move on with installing this stuff so bear with this because we're gonna start off with the most important decision you're going to make in your drywall installation and that is where to start generally speaking when you're dealing with drywall you want to start with the ceilings but I want you to listen what I got to say here because you want to resist the temptation to just start against the outside wall and here's why if you've been a fan of this channel at all and you heard me say this before you'll never find a room that's square now drywall is square so here's your room let's just say we're putting in a nice square room and there's no problems with it and you assume it's square that means when you put your drywall against that edge on the ceiling it'll be nice and perfect all the way across no gaps right but in reality your room is probably more like this and then when you put your drywall against the wall and you've measured from this point to this point and it says 11 feet you cut your drywall square and what you get is this you get a piece of drywall that goes like this now if you turn that drywall to fit now your drywall doesn't fit the hole it's along a one side big gap on the other side causes your world to hurt you're up there on a ladder with your buddy going oh it doesn't fit somebody tries to do something stupid and jamming in there you break your drywall and now you got a huge gap save yourself all that aggravation what I want you to do is just start by measuring over 45 or 46 inches okay take that measurement and write it on the wall we'll call it 11 feet move over 4 feet take that measurement okay and then what you're gonna have is because you're using the short side of the wall if it's still 11 feet here to hear the you are installing its square now the distance here might be 44 on one side and 45 on the other side but you can cut that because your sheets 48 inches wide so all you do is just start your line just a few inches shy of the width of a drywall and measure both lines and install that sheet first and then put that into fill so the rest of this whole room will go in nice and square and generally speaking one of these walls will be square and you can take your square in a level and you can throw it across your framing and you can double check in a corner to see how it's doing find the one corner that's the most square and work off of that one okay but to make your life simple because your it's really hard to measure a perfect piece of drywall the first time just start 44 inches in and then off you go what we're gonna do Matt if you could just do that so when you're communicating with somebody else in the room and let's say there's two of you're working you've got a friend helping to hang your drywall what you want to do is establish you know which wall is your your level wall okay so we have a beam that's supporting the open space in this house so this is our beam all right so when I'm asking for a measurement I'm asking first from the beam out and then from the beam out right and I'm gonna say this wall here has a door and this one has a window so we can communicate right so when I'm making my drywall here I'm gonna be taking this sheet putting it over and lifting it up so I can right door side and I know when he's given me a measurement that this door side this is going to be the square side that's going to be the cut end because we're gonna pick it up and go like this and install it this way okay I don't know if that made a lot of sense but let's try that one more time the door is over here so we're gonna pick the sheet up rotate it just like in the picture and lift it up so my my door symbol would be on that part of the drywall so when I'm installing this the other end here ends up down here on the square wall we're not cutting we're gonna cut the other side in case these dimensions are different so so we're gonna just measure this together now we're measuring based on this floor joist because this floor joist is 45 inches in the room which is a perfect okay Matt right to the stud what's my actual measurement uh 134 and like 7/8 of some of that 134 to 7/8 okay so what I'm gonna write is 134 7/8 okay now we want to move over 1 2 3 more studs now these joists are actually three studs there Joyce these joists are 16 inches apart so if you just count three more it's actually four feet it's a great cheat it's one of the reasons why I love having things strapped because it makes math so much easier 135 and 1/4 so here we go all right that's a huge difference the other side down here it's 135 and 1/4 important to write these down now you want to do a little math because the last thing you want to do is cut this drywall exactly the right dimension so if this represents the whole dimension the wall ceiling in the wall you want your drywall to actually come a little bit short at the end all the way across wow that's almost a straight line and then short on the other side remember the drywall is half an inch thick so if you're 1/4 inch shy over here at a quarter a shy over here that makes it a lot easier to install and the next sheet that goes up is going to come out past that point all right and it's gonna go in horizontal but you're gonna have a nice solid joint there so you don't have to worry about being perfect drywall is not finished carpentry its drywall so you really want to take advantage of the opportunities you have to cut these short spaces so that the install goes nice and simple all right so this becomes a half an inch shorter so we're taking a quarter inch from each side so you take half an inch off of that now this is fractions I know it's math right this is gonna be crazy half an inch in eighths is actually 4 eighths so you take that off leaves you three eighths so we're gonna end up with one thirty-four and three eighths the other side we got 135 and 1/4 that ends up being 134 and 3/4 so because these numbers are different we're gonna want to put the mark on the top and the bottom and then connect the dots now this is a really old house and as a result I'm not surprised that they're different now this is our new tool we're gonna introduce this the t-square for drywall and if you put that point it sits on this on the drywall right on my mark now I'm a good I'm about a half an inch off down here so there's options for cutting in you'll see in drywall videos people will take their tape measure and they'll take their knife they'll extend the blade a little bit and they'll basically hold the knife to the tape okay and then they can measure and they can cut and you can set this up if I wrote the door on the other side of the drywall I'll be cutting on this end and then you can set this up where your finger is actually the guide and then you just pinch the drywall with the measurement you want and you can cut a straight line with the knife okay and that works great when you're making square cuts but in situations like this you can't use the tape you can't cheat so what we're gonna do is we're going to use our square and we're going to just move the bottom of that and to connect the dots use our total hold it in position draw a line with a pencil the reason you want the pencil is when you're working like this sometimes it's difficult to keep everything where you want it so having a visual guide to make sure that you're still on track is a good thing okay now we just press it against the drywall and we're lightly cutting the paper okay this is not an exercise I'm trying to cut all the way through the board now very important to have a really sharp knife here I recommend the Olfa knife I'm not getting paid to say this I just been using them for years it's adjustable its retractable they have a snap off blade and you get a lot of life out of this so this one blade is gonna do all the hot drywall in this whole room because what you're doing is you're cutting the paper remember drywall is paper with all the compressed gypsum in between the two layers as long as you can cut the paper you'll break the board no problem now the way you break this after you put the score it's just that's it a little bit of a wiggle all right nothing to it now as you fold the drywall back like this you got control of it's not gonna fall over now the reason we always have the white paper facing the front is it leaves a nice clean line and when I break that drywall the part that I'm looking at and I'm working with with my mud is nice and clean if I cut from the brown side okay and I break it and something goes wrong or my knife gets dull I end up with a bunch of these kind of pieces of paper tearing off now when I go to finish my drywall I can't tape that I'd actually got to come by and tear every single piece of that off all the way down the edge alright so in order to avoid that I always have the white side out and cut that then you step back behind the drywall with your knife from bottom to the top and you're cutting through just paper now you're sticking your blade all the way through but you're only cutting paper because the gypsum is out of the way and then grab both sides so they don't fall over set the garbage to the side there we go now it's ready for installation all we have to do is assemble our drywall lift throw it up in the ceiling all right so just before you put your drywall on the ceiling I want to take one more look and you want to get measurements so anything that you have to use a cutout tool after the fact now this is why I'm suggesting you use a cutout tool boxes like this they're an issue you have electrical fixtures you have heat ducts you can have fans all kinds of different protrusions through the drywall when it's finished generally speaking you want to cut those out with a cutout tool after you install the drywall because if you try to measure exactly the location onto that drywall based on where it goes up you're going to be really disappointed remember we're leaving a little bit of gap on each side the world isn't perfectly square even if we think it is the drywall is square you're cutting might not be straight there's so many variables that leaving all of the cutouts until after it's installed is your best bet so what you want to do is you want to measure the center murk of this fixture center line and you want to write it on your plastic wall you can't dry wall without a marker I'm telling you right now this is like the most important tool 58 inches okay so at around the 58 inch mark I'm gonna put an arrow okay I'm gonna put 58 and then I'm gonna measure from the other side 45 and then I'm gonna put this arrow 45 doesn't look like much but as soon as I put this sheet up I'm going to check my wall okay and I'm going to draw this and Mark that spot on the drywall for a future cut out tool now I think I'll show that on the video right away anyway but the point is your system should be check where your sheets going make sure any protrusions you've got labeled and marked and then the next sheet over you can always take a pencil and Mark it on the drywall right where the next to where the protrusion is and you can just follow that system one sheet at a time nice and methodical don't be in a hurry and bury everything that's generally how drywallers do it that goes so quick they always miss something take it easy make notes think twice double-check now you can proceed so here's our our drywall lift these products are generally available at a lot of tool rental stores you can just rent them for the day or just a few hours if that's all you need it for Peregrin pro manufacture company one that makes this this is made in the USA solid steel it's an amazing tool and if you haven't seen the other video where we discussed the difference between this and the cheap junk that's available on Amazon I actually bought one just to check it out and we did a video on the differences pros and cons you've really got to check that out I'm just going to whip this together and start putting up the drywall while Matt goes out to buy our lunch just a quick note before you go sticking your drywall on and closing your ceiling make sure you've made a map of all of your electrical you need to know the exact center locations for after the fact so you can draw your holes for all your pot lights crucial now let's just recap we've got our drywall we've got a cup we got it measured we know it's square in the room we're going about 44 inches off the fixture we're gonna cut out is written on the wall so in reality this drywall can go pretty much anywhere within a few inches right as long as it fits in the hole it doesn't matter where it lands we're gonna be just fine this is the benefit of my system you don't have to be perfect in your location you just want to get it roughly in the area keep an eye on things try to keep them relatively square all right buh-buh-buh now we were trying to go off this floor joist here or give or take about that spot now I know I'm less than 48 inches to the wall good look a little bit tighter I've tucked to all my wires up so there's not gonna be any problem there alright now I just want to make sure my gap here you're straight and it's not and this is my key if the gap on each side of this drywall to my header is the same I know I'm going in somewhat square so I'm just gonna make a couple of modifications before I put too much tension on it I like that and then the last thing I got to do is give it a little bit of tension push it up there nice and tight now nothing's gonna go anywhere I'm free to go get my tools and screw that out so here's the thing I just went out and I bought a new dimple or bit from Dewalt and it goes to spring loaded does a great job throw on your screw and generally speaking the idea is it sets the screw deep enough that it is recessed so it's not too proud so you can fill it with mud and it doesn't break the paper and the way you can test that is use a 5:1 just rub over top there's no clicking sound here that okay clicks it's not deep enough so then you can adjust this just by turning the head you can turn the head in and out and then you set the wheel behind it to Snug it up right anyway I just wanted to show you that because that's a nice little tool and I picked that up so that you know we'd have some options but I also went up and picked up a new tool for Matty he doesn't own a screw gun yet and so this is a drywall screw gun it's very specific tool it's generally only for drywall and it has a adjustable neck as well and so it's very quick and so you can turn the motor on the tip doesn't spin until you put pressure on it all right and then that's not deep enough obviously so then you adjust your head until you get what you want out of it that's too deep so I'm just gonna play around here a little bit until I get the right depth setting nope still not deep enough so I'm going to turn one more click maybe I liken that it's just barely though so I want to throw one more it on there there perfect now it's set in place one little suggestion I have is Matt actually can you grab the electrical tape take a little bit of electrical tape and wrap it on the Chuck now now that you have the depth set there's no need to fine-tune it there's no situation the need for that will change so we're just gonna take care of that right now now I got that taped on it's good to go forever and ever every meant but listen this particular tool is like only 80 bucks and the way you hold it is it has like a pistol grip so they're always pushing right up through the screws and you're not gonna slip off and just use the your last couple fingers how runs the trigger nice and easy now it's corded which means it's a good deal all right 80 bucks hello if your drywalling you don't have power in the house then you're probably in brand-new construction you might need to get a corded cordless version put that's like 300 or so so I prefer to go with corded especially for home renovations this is a great tool upgrade for a homeowner because it's one of those things that if you have you can make really quick work of this job and it's gonna be a perfect screw every time and you're not going to be adjusting and fiddling around and breaking through paper and causing all those problems associated with just using a hand drill definitely one by one you want to buy any of these tools the lift the drill is a little bit's you can go to our web page now the links in the description we've got a brand new affiliates link there so we got affiliates for all kinds of different companies so feel free to do your shop in there there should be some deals available everybody's got different prices on different things so you can do some comparative shopping but we just put together a little bit of a resource for you to help make shop easier another quick tip if you find a hardware store that sells screws in bulk you just pay by the pound it's half price when you go to the store and you buy them in these little plastic containers uh-huh half price the best part of using a screw gun in this situation is it's really super quick and you don't run the risk having any problems with puncturing the paper so now for the next sheet you'll notice that when you screw the drywall in now you have the strapping is marked with this drywall now cross here we need a mark this is again where this black marker comes in handy it's a nice big black line under each one of you strapping on the plastic and you won't have any issues with knowing where to attach your drywall so as long as you put a screw on this each strap on this sheet and you mark with the marker on this side you'll know all your locations for putting on the next sheet so here we get into something a little bit more tricky because we're putting in a sheet that's going to get cut it's not a fully four feet across so when you're cutting your sheet down you really want to be cutting where it's comfortable up here it's a lot easier to cut here and break it and trim it than at the bottom obviously that means this is now gonna be my factory edge on the ceiling so last time we took the sheet and we basically lifted it up like this right and that would make this the cut side if we did that again so now I've got to do this let's dig I got to flip it around so you're gonna get very confused so this is where knowing where the door is and marking it on this is gonna be very important so this is gonna be the door side where I'm gonna be cutting off okay so I'm gonna put the cut side here so now I got to visualize grabbing this sheet and going the other way all right that makes left right and right left very odd so our measurement on where the where the joint is is 134 and 3/8 we're gonna put that number down here now okay the cut side I remote down 133 and 3/4 okay and just for safety sake this is my beam okay so when we're picking it up we're picking it up like this and that beam goes over there behind us and that whole cut side will be on the outside that actually makes sense and the reason you have to be very careful here is because the cut line at each end are different measurements and it's so easy to get them reversed and then you cut the wrong angle so end up with it doesn't fit on one side it's a huge gap on the other side the right side of the sheet I wrote down is 42 and three-eighths that's over there and that's at this end 42 and 3/8 from here and the other end is 42 and 3/4 okay so now we have all that figured out so we're just going to draw that line on the angle again like we did last time now here's the thing five and a quarter is how much for cutting off on this side and five and a half on the other side now it might seem like a small thing but if we take our total amount which is what one forty something that one 3465 around here that's about the center of the board if we make a mark here five and a quarter or five and a half the difference is five and three-eighths okay then I can go like this with the pencil I can hold it on five and five and a quarter and I can start drawing 5min a quarter and slowly bring my pencil down to five and three-eighths where it hits the middle right about here and then slowly bring it down the marker to five and a half BAM so I've drawn a straight line that's actually on an angle over 11 feet it's a great trick if you can get good at that now you can freehand cut this just trace it out with a knife bring your blade out about a half an inch remember we're only cutting the paper so you don't have to use a lot of pressure you don't have to go deep just got to get that a nice sharp blade in the paper and then just set your hand your fingers up against the drywall and all you do is instead of looking at the blade look an inch in front of it and as long as you're looking at the at the pencil mark you'll find your blade will almost instinctively cut that mark within a millimeter or two it's not going to be an issue because remember we've already taken off about a quarter inch or so off that measurement to allow the wall board to cover the gap and you can do the same thing on this edge because this is on an angle if you make the mark with your pencil okay all you got to do is get close doesn't have to be perfect if you make a mistake make it on the short side it's easier to fill okay we break that a nice clean cut then we start down here [Music] it gets really big it's hard to manage now you can cut this from both sides just be cautious and be aware where the blade is the whole time okay go both Irish how's that feel yeah that's pretty balanced you can extend my arm here okay one thing to remember is try to leave the handle in the wheel facing you when you're going tight to the wall all right there we go a little bit now once we get close now it's time to worry about that we're up there nice if you're not afraid of the noise these awesome guns we've got a little trigger set on here so leave the motor on the whole time and the only time the tip spins is when there's compression so don't mind me all right so now we're going to talk about installing the walls we're gonna get three measurements here the tops the middle and the bottom because we're putting our sheets in horizontally those are the three numbers that we're gonna need one thirty four will go with we'll reach up as high as I can go okay in the bottom believable I've always found his best practice alright to get me all these measurements we're gonna treat that corner like it's square actually we're gonna treat this one again square because this one is that one actually slopes in one of my tips for my system is using the plastic as a way to make notes right so I'm gonna get Matt to just write down all the dimensions from this corner which were gonna call square because we put a level on it and we'll measure right to left in these cases when we want the drywall to end okay well put the number here so that we can translate that information we're gonna go tight to the ceiling from a factory edge so we can also measure from the ceiling down to the header okay get me those two points as well you do all of that I'm gonna start translating this information from a full sheet and I'll cut the board okay so this box here is it's a live box right it's already in place we're not gonna use the kind of a tool here because we got a switch attached to it instead of disengaging the wiring and putting it all back together again what we're gonna do is we're gonna take these two screws out pull this out twist it we're gonna pre-cut the hole on the drywall for this okay it's not the greatest plan but it's a good plan for the situation let's show people how to do that so we're gonna get this measurement exact measurements for these four quarters off that wall in this wall we're assuming that this is relatively square here just because we put that stud in with the laser level we should get pretty close then I'm gonna just take those measurements and make the hole little bit bigger and then we'll come and install that together so we're done here is we've measured the sheet to fit the whole wall we've measured out where the the framework ends around the door okay so this all gets cut out that represents the door so there's the frame there's the insulation and then there's actual frame in the wall so you got door jamb insulation wall frame we're measuring to the edge of the wall frame so we don't have interruption with the foam and then over here we just marked out where the location of the plug is and we're going to cut that in advance because it's a live plug the switch is already attached this is a Seco system you can use at home if your drywalling a space that's already finished the idea here is they cut all this and then then install it so that it's one piece we don't have joints around the door because joints are in the door or the most likely place you're gonna find cracks figure that so if you can eliminate the risk of the crack you solve a problem before it starts now this is an old - I've been using this for about 12 years now drywall saw the teeth on it every other tooth they go in two different directions so they actually cut the hole a little wider than the blade itself makes really quick and easy to cut holes nice and simple just a few bucks but having a good hand tool on you all the difference in the world right so that's gonna mark the ceiling where the studs intersect make sure you hit the middle of the stud that was the outside of this mat it's really important to get the middle the stud knowing that where you start the pencil is embarrass take action we're not gonna know where it is now because the door jamb is already installed we're gonna cut this in advance of getting over there all right we just put our level on the ground here just to create a lever because the our ground is actually a little warped so if I had this sitting on the ground and then I cut it out it might snap the drywall in half because the floors doing wonky things really [Music] well that drywall kind of tool is amazing it's a noisy it's dusty but man is it efficient and you can also use it for cutting around all your electrical boxes that don't have wiring it will show you that in just a minute let's get this in place nice and easy on this one okay because of the door issue you want to be more in the middle of that panel so that you have got a lot of control okay you're over that so let me put my end up first then what close like a door how's that working ok now you can see how crazy wonky this house is this is how how worked everything is right how did you measure this I give I cut it the measurement that's written on the wall look at the gap I'm two inches away from where I should be here's the evidence this is the number that he gave me measuring from here across so that's the number that I cut the truth is the stud is at fifty six and a half because I need the drywall on the wood to attach it you're on the room how am I gonna screw the wood if you cut it over here oh you told me I'm messing the edge of this done wrong edge we're gonna attach it to the wall big point of it this is one of these moments where you just go moose Papa ah okay so two things have were there one there is a apparently breakdown of communication and we're gonna blame me that's fine I get that but to the ceiling on this house is so out of whack the floor is out of whack there's nothing square to work with here so in it in most homes you don't deal with the 1880 Payne but here we are so what we're gonna do is we're going to start on the floor so that we at least have something to measure from it's kind of a similar concept of the ceiling starting with a second sheet we put it on the floor throw it in the corner that sits nice so that can be treated like square and then we're just going to come over here and we're gonna mark where to cut the boards that we can screw it to the stud and then BAM so now I'm gonna cut that line are you kidding me look at that even this this is out almost an inch over four feet oh my god everything is here is so crooked it's our job to make a look straight all right so all that information about measuring that's all great information because generally we like to install tight against the ceiling and that works great if your house is level but in this case everything is old and twists in a weird so it's better for us to work here so we have a nice straight edge that we can measure off because even once we put that sheet in there we realized we were installing like this and the same thing happened where things were too long or too short it's just wacky now if you go you this and I'll measure and cut the next piece and then we'll be able to measure nice and snug up to the ceiling and all of our points across here and we'll be able to basically trace out the contour that ceiling unreal so since I'm installing this drywall first I'm just translating this information about where that box is this 8 inches over and 19 inches up there we go and that'll be fine I'm also going to need to just remove a little bit of work here for that box nice but a little bit of luck I'll be able to we're gonna listen behind yes sir once you get a couple of screws in just stop get your cutting tool out we know the middle of that location in the box now this particular tool the tip of it is like a guide point and it doesn't have a cutting wheel on it so it'll just run around the perimeter what we do is we puncture the hole we run to the edge we hop over the other side of the box and then we keep pressure on the outside of that box until we've traced it out and it cuts through the drywall [Music] perfect every time oh yeah Wow so here's how we do this boom that's close to the middle six feet right there all right in this situation and I mean if you could do this kind of drywall installation whatever you face you're gonna be fine if you have square and you have level you have a lot of advantage if you don't and you're working an old house like this you've really got a user noggin and you got to have a laser level what I'm gonna do I've marked out six feet exactly on that drywall BAM there's my mark now here's the best part there we go there's my six foot mark right here okay six feet now what I'm gonna do and I'm tipping my six foot mark on okay there we go all the way up and down now what we're gonna do is we're going to take our measurements from the wall from that line measuring at the bottom of the drywall which will be my finished edge to the edge to the corner which is six feet because we measured from there so I know that's six feet I'm going to take it from the top measure it to the outside corner so now we're gonna measure from our 6-foot mark over to the corner all right so seventy one and a half that's just a half inch less than six feet so now I'm going to translate that information over to this side I know I gotta take a half an inch off here to zero and we're gonna just do this over and over and over again measuring all of the elements on that wall well based on that center line using the center line and the drywall as our level this sounds kind of complicated but the reality is if we have a horizontal line and we have a center line and we measure everything up and then off we can find every point around the outside of that perimeter of that sheet of drywall including cut out around the door and we can cut all that up first and then just set it in place perfectly what we want to do is create a multitude of points for taking measurements from this was just over four feet don't need a measurement just over four feet that one's exactly four feet and I'm okay if there's a little gap at the top of the sheet I'm not concerned about it because you'll be able to fix that later it's not ideal but in this scenario nothing is gonna be ideal just under four feet okay so far so good we know the other sheet of drywall comes up a little bit so over here we're down to four and a half forty seven and a half inches forty seven a half inches so that the the ceiling definitely drops here a little bit so I'm taking a half an inch off the top over here because this whole side drops now that I've got a level edge you can see how it at the tape it just pops down there right amazing.i so we're following this drops right here so we're gonna we're gonna cut that drop in and we're going to continue measuring out for this line at the bottom the sheet they cut around the door in the bud ah once we get that all done then we'll be ready to install [Music] so before you let the guy you can go let go now take off make sure you get a screw near the top otherwise if somebody comes in the room and opens the door the air pressure change will pull the drywall right off the wall you might not be looking I learned that one the hard way now if you're watching this video and you're wondering how in the heck is he gonna fill all that crap look at these gaps it looks pretty nasty right reality is this is not a problem if you have the right tools and equipment and know-how and that information is going to be in this next video so click the link here to find out what we did don't forget to subscribe to the channel and give us a thumbs up if this helped you at all

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 142,610

Rating: 4.9138575 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, jeff, thorman

Id: yLlV4CafDiU

Length: 37min 8sec (2228 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2019