In our house, the Laundry Room and the Kitchen are the most dated and upgrade ready rooms in the house.
The kitchen cupboards are 80's melamine with a mirrored backsplash and laminate counter tops. The ceramic floor tiles are cracked and loose, the layout is too spread out and the walls are a dark brown.
The attached laundry room has ugly as heck wallpaper, awkwardly sized home made cabinets of dubious quality and a wavy vinyl floor.
This year's major house renovations will be to completely redo the kitchen and laundry rooms. We'll start with the laundry room - once it is fixed up I'll setup a temporary sink in there and tear apart the kitchen.
First, a few before shots of the laundry room. Nice wallpaper!
I had hoped to tear out the cabinets, strip out the wallpaper, the patch and paint the walls. Unfortunately I found a surprise when I tore out the cabinets - part of the wall was cinder block. The remainder of the wall was plaster directly attached to the cinder block which is beyond my skills to replicate. Parts of the cinder block were on the same plane as the plaster in the adjacent wall (to the right) so there was no way I could just add drywall to cover the cinder blocks - I'd have to cover the entire wall with drywall.
Finishing drywall is definitely not a skill I've mastered very well so I knew this would be a bit of a challenge. I called a guy who's done some other drywall work for me but he decided to retire from drywall earlier in the month so I was on my own. I started by strapping the walls with some 1x3s, using construction adhesive and screws to attach the strapping to the plaster.
The ends of the 1x3 were attached to the cinder blocks with a powdered actuated fastener (Hilti DX 36). I used cedar wedges to fur out the 1x3s on the cinder block so then lined up with the strapping on the plaster.
Once the strapping was in place, it was time to add the drywall. Two sheets of 4x10 1/2" drywall covered this wall, I needed one other 4x8 sheet to cover up some plaster on the opposite wall.
I scoured the web for about an hour to brush up on my drywall finishing knowledge, here's a few sites I liked :
- This Old House - How to Finish Drywall
- Hometime - Drywall
- DrywallInfo.com
After the drywall was hung, Joshua gave me a hand taping the joints. I used paper tape for the flat seam and preformed metal corner beads for the corner and ceiling.
Here I am finishing up the first coat of mud. It took me another three coats to get everything smooth enough. Not a perfect job but good enough for the laundry room. I definitely need to find (competent) help for the kitchen drywall job.
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