Have you ever tried to hang drywall on a ceiling? If you have, you know it is a royal pain in
the butt, right? So in today’s video, my buddy, Steve White from SRW Contracting, is
going to show you how to hang drywall on a ceiling without breaking your back. He’s
going to share all the tools and different supplies that you need for this project. And
in the end, I’ve got a really great surprise for you, so don’t miss out on that. Let’s
jump into the tutorial right now. All right. Hi, I’m Steve with SRW Contracting.
Today we’re going to show you how to use the drywall lift. This is pretty much step
1 of remodeling your bathroom, is getting your ceiling in first before you start putting
in your tub surround and other things. So first thing you want to do is make sure
you measure all your boxes, if you have any recess lights. Just try to get the center.
What we’re going to do is use a RotoZip for it. So just measure. I always just write
them on the wall here so I don’t forget what they are. Fifty-two. Five twenty-five.
Then we have a vent fan here. Twenty-four. One sixty.
So just measure them, so when we put up the drywall you can kind of figure out where…
we’ll show that in the next video, but we’re going to use a RotoZip to basically cut out
the area. And I guess that’s one thing I can explain about vent fans. I think a lot
of people get confused. They see this little lip on a vent fan and they feel that you have
a piece of drywall and this lip should go outside of the new drywall. That’s not the
case. You usually just put these vent fans straight up against the joist and then hang
the drywall and just cutting out the interior of it. So when you see any type of fan that
has a lip on it, that’s not necessarily supposed to be on the outside of the new drywall.
That just gives like a seal against the drywall. I just measure it, basically wherever. Forty-four
inches. Pretty close to the center. By five foot. I always just mark it on the walls so
I don’t forget what it is. It is helpful to have somebody with you, but
like I said, I work by myself all the time. You just put the piece of drywall. The backside
of it should be facing up. The finished side is facing down. And then, like I said, this
rotates around. I kind of want to get control of the cable. And you just lift it up. You
have to do a bit of fiddling around to get it in place, but this is certainly a lot easier
than having another person trying to help you line everything up. If you got it tight
against the ceiling, you can just drop it down a little bit. I just want to make sure
I have my drywall cut square against the wall so that the rest of mine is going to be easily
square with the room. I always use 5/8 drywall for the ceiling.
It just stays a lot flatter and straighter. A lot of homes now may have trusses and you
have spacing of 24 inches on center. So you really want to go with the thicker drywall
so you don’t have any bowing. And like I said, it just keeps a flatter surface than
using ½”. Half-inch on the walls everywhere you want, but 5/8 really makes a nice one
on the ceiling. And if you did have 24” center joists, it actually isn’t a bad idea
that you would just put a little bit of liquid nail on each joist, and that’ll help keep
contact to that joist. In a 8’ sheet, you’re only going to have 4 joists you’re screwing
to. But on 16 on center, there’s really no need for that extra drill. It wouldn’t
necessarily be necessary. I use a little dimple bit for drywall. With
a regular screw tip, you would end up going all the way through the paper. But this stops
it. There’s no need to get an actual drywall gone when you have something like this, especially
if you’re hanging 5 or 6 sheets. I like the coarse screws. They seem to just
thread into the wood faster. And if you’re doing 5/8 drywall, you want to do 1 5/8”.
You want to get a good inch into that. And then a lot of the drywall—I don’t know
if you can see it—but they usually have little Xs, basically showing… First off,
they’re all in a line. But secondly, they’re every 16”. And that’s all you really need
to do is have 4 screws every 16” on a 4’ sheet, and then on every joist, every 16”.
So these little markers, where these Xs are, really help out, just to keep you where it’s
at. And you see how that dimple kind of presses it into the drywall. So when you finish the
mud, you don’t have the screws sitting out. Sometimes it’s nice to mark the sides of
your walls where the joist would be so that you’re not trying to guess where it’s
at, because the more holes you put in the drywall, the more you have to finish. And
you normally don’t want to have to finish more than you have to.
I mean really just an inch away from the edge; maybe less than an inch. You just don’t
want it at the very, very edge because if you did, it kind of blows out the joint, and
you’re not able to get the other piece of drywall nice and flush. So just leave an inch
from the edge. Okay, so it’s hung now, and you can just
take your lift down. Some will have dual stops to keep it from falling down on your head
if you let it go. And that’s it. That makes it a heck of a lot easier to be able to put
that up. And then we’ll be able to take some of the screws out there then take the
RotoZip up and cut out the fixtures that we have on the ceiling.
So as a rule of thumb, you really want to minimize the amount of joints that you have
on drywall. That’s just more areas that you have to actually finish. But as a rule
of thumb, you usually go perpendicular with the joists. So an 8’ sheet will go perpendicular
with the joists, the way we have here. Normally, it allows you to have 8’ meet on the joists.
But it really all depends on the least amount of seams. Normally you want to have it all
so that the tapered edges of the drywall meet each other. Going perpendicular is usually
a rule of thumb. Okay, that’s it. That’s as simple as hanging
drywall with the drywall lift. It’ll save your neighbors time, and you’ll be able
to have the satisfaction of putting the ceiling up yourself.
Cool stuff. That’s how you hang drywall on a ceiling, right? And thank you so much,
Steve, for your awesome pro tips. Really appreciate it. You’re going to see a ton more videos
from Steve, so make sure you stay tuned to the Home Repair Tutor videos that are coming
out. So here’s the surprise. We’re going to
give away one Home Depot gift card back on over at HomeRepairTutor.com. So head on over
to HomeRepairTutor.com, check out the latest tutorial on how to hang drywall in a ceiling,
and enter the giveaway because that way you can use it to rent a drywall lift or get a
really awesome set of tools that you need for projects around the house. So head on
over to HomeRepairTutor.com, enter into the giveaway. I think you’d really like that.
And while you’re over there, you may want to join the newsletter because we have about
11,000 people who are on our newsletter. You get that that every single week. And they
stay up-to-date on the video tutorials and all the cool giveaways and stuff like that.
You can’t see it in this video, but I’m surrounded by tools that we’re going to
have giveaways for coming up. So I’m really excited about that stuff.
Thanks for watching the video today. I really appreciate your time. Take care, and I’ll
see you next week.