Drywall hanging is a tedious, messy, and largely unrewarding process. Until it’s done. Completion is thoroughly satisfying. But every step of the way up to the point of completion will be a war of willpower. It will test your resolve. The half-finished walls will keep staring at you defying you to finish them. At one point in the drywalling process you will legitimately contemplate suicide or arson.

The challenges associated with a drywall project extend through every phase of the job. For starters, the boards are heavy, yet brittle. It takes two angry men and a gorilla to carry two of the really big ones. And you have to be really careful while you do carry them because you’ll gouge an irreparable hole in them if you bump into a wall. Or, you’ll break a corner if you set a panel down wrong. Things that heavy shouldn’t be that fucking fragile. But they are.

Hanging drywall is a conundrum of logic-defying practices that kill the inner perfectionist. For instance, when you measure drywall to hang it, don’t bother getting it exactly right. Measure and subtract a quarter inch because when you hang a board, the imperfections in your framing will always cause it to not fit in one place or another. Trying to cut it exactly right will leave you chopping off bits of the sheet with your utility knife to make it fit. All this while holding the heavy son-of-a-bitch above your head for five minutes. Anyone who has tried to hold a flexing, bending, heavy-ass ten foot sheet of drywall against a ceiling for any extended period of time knows what I’m talking about. That thing is heavy.

The inaccuracy of the trimming process kills the spirit of my inner carpenter who appreciates cutting a board perfectly with precision and accuracy. With drywall the motto is “Fuck it and just get the shit on the wall.” To further confound you and prove what a logic-defying evil bastard drywall is, you don’t want to undercut your sheet so much you end up with a humongous gap either. That won’t fill well with mud. Excellent drywall hanging is all about splitting the difference between being a perfectionist and a hack. Exasperation can easily set in at this point.

Drywall work is pretty clean compared to demolition or shoveling manure, but it’s still one of the messiest damned things you’ll ever do. Plan to be covered in mud and dust frequently. And keep a broom and big dust pan handy. You’ll be sweeping – often.

You can hang drywall with nails or screws. I chose screws because they seem faster and easier for one person installation work. Now, drilling a screw into a panel seems like it should be a pretty simple operation. Simply find the stud and shoot in a screw. Easy right? They’re sixteen inches apart. I’m a good judge of distance, so piece-of-cake? Nope. You’ll miss the stud with 20% regularity. I can’t tell you how often that you’ll use your best guess as to where that phantom stud is in the wall and drill hole after hole in the sheet. Holes that will need patching later.

Don’t underestimate the importance of getting your pieces flat and square when you can. You will appreciate it later. Shim if you must. Don’t plan to fix it later. The thoughts of suicide and arson will revisit you. 

Finishing and mudding also takes experience. You have to learn when to fix something and when to leave it alone. When to smooth out a bump and when to ignore it. I can’t tell you how often I’ve made the mistake of thinking that if I only gave the mud one more swipe with my 8 inch knife, I’d get it perfect… Only to pick up a crumb of partially dry mud and drag it right through my nearly perfect application. It will take another twenty swipes to get it back to where you had it. Infallible drywall rule: if it’s pretty damned good, leave it the fuck alone.

Drywall work will push you to the limit. I have let loose with a three minute stream of expletives that would make a longshoreman cringe while hanging the stuff.  Drywall work doesn’t make you tough – it reveals whether you actually are or not. 

Here’s my drywall mudding philosophy in a nutshell: Don’t try to get the first coat perfect. It will just shrink and look like crap anyway. Perfection is for the third coat. But, confoundingly, make sure and get that first coat is as good as you can. It’s the only way to ensure that the third coat will look good.

Sanding is another adventure in dust and dirt. You want to sand as little as possible, but don’t eschew the process as your end result will stink. Cardinal rule: apply as little mud as you need to get the job done. Don’t build up too much thinking you’ll just sand it later. It won’t work out like you think.

With enough tenacity, you’ll eventually get done. But not unscathed. No matter how good it looks you’ll still feel a little dirty inside. Unclean. You won’t feel like you conquered but rather like you merely survived. A completed job leaves you feeling like one of the guys still alive after a battle in the movie Braveheart. You know you’ve just been through some heavy shit, but you’re standing there alive to talk about it. You may have lost a finger, an ear, and have a broken arm from the battle, but you vanquished the enemy – now it’s time to celebrate with some concubines and some grog.

Logic be damned. That’s drywall. I admire anyone who chooses to do this professionally. The pros make it look easy. I assure you, it’s not.