Today’s project happens to be hanging drywall in my back room, which got me to wondering. I’ve been told for years to always hang drywall from the top down, and always put the sheets horizontal and not vertical. But I’ve never been told why. Google gave me a few dozen sites about how to hang drywall, but none of them had any reasons behind the method.
I guess in most houses, you’ll end up with two sheets of drywall and a slight gap at the bottom which gets covered up by the baseboard. Is this the only reason?
My guess is that you want the major seams to end up as unobtrusive as possible, and starting at the top (to keep the seams away from eye-level) and hanging the drywall vertically help with that.
That’s strange. In Australia the product is called gyprock and is plaster between cardboard like sheets. It is put up vertically and with the process used to join sheets you can’t see any joins. I believe it is done like this because the height from floor to ceiling in most houses is stock standard so you just measure the perimeter of the room to work out how many sheets you need. When you do a wall with standard sheets you only ever have to cut them if the last one is too big.
Drywall sheets are thinner along their long edges. Laying them from the top down and horizontally means that you will create a long seams that are easier to patch. Hanging them vertically will result in a long horizontal seam where the sheets butt together at their thick ends, which is much more difficult to patch in a seamless way.
Yep, you hang it horizontally from the top down so you get a good edge at the ceiling. You can have a gap at the floor which is covered by baseboard.
I think that running it horizontal instead of vertically produces a finish that is less likely to crack at the seems. If the ‘rock’ is vertical, the seem is on one 2x4. If you where to bump real hard into that 2x you may crack it.
Also, 2x4s are not always that straight. They may have, oh, say up to ¼" of crown in them. I think that laying the drywall horizontally, it does not tend to bring out those imperfections. That’s just IMHO.
So are you suggesting vertical, or horizontal? I never did get this. I understand why sheet-rock is thinner on the long edges. Why not do it on the short edges as well?
Drywall is generally recommended to be hung vertically for two reasons. First off, the seams are less noticable. If you hold a light at a low angle to a flat surface, you are much more likely to see the imperfections. Picture walking down a hall… If the sheetrock is mounted vertically, your eye will notice the seams up ahead more noticably because of the acute angle. If it is mounted horizontally, the sheet rock seam is a slightly more obtuse angle (unless you are 12 feet tall) and slightly less noticable. I think of equal importance is the ease of finishing the joint. On vertical mounted sheetrock, the joint runs from ceiling to floor and it requires that you stretch and stoop in order to finish the joint. On horizontal, the joint is an easy to reach and consistent 4 feet off the floor.
As for why it is mounted top down… You put in the ceiling first. Then butt the walls up to the ceiling. This helps lock the ceiling into place and keep the joint from cracking.
All that said… I am not a professional, but I have done LOTS of sheetrock work and it is as good as any I’ve seen. I always mount it vertical. For a single man operation, it is too hard to hold an entire sheet four feet off the floor and attach it to the wall. It is much easier to cut the board to the exact length then stand it up on the floor and attach. BTW, if you are doing this and not just asking out of curiosity… use screws, not nails. Buy a screwgun if you need to. You will be much happier with the results
Hanging sheet rock from the top is somewhat easier to do alone. Whether it’s vertical or horizontal, once the two top corners are fixed, the sheet hangs flat against the studs, and the rest of the screws are easy to set. If you affix the bottom corners first, the whole sheet can pivot away from the wall (especially if you care briefly distracted from your task). Drywall crumbles easily under compression, and the weight of the entire board can easily tear out the screwheads. It wouldn’t happen often, but it’d be annoying -and could crack the entire sheet, each time it did.
Hanging sheets vertically minimizes the number and type of seams: you only seam the long sides - a net of about 8’ per sheet, net, for a large room, since each seam is shared by two sheets. (The ceiling corner is so forgiving that it hardly counts) Horizontally hung sheetrock requires far more care from the seamer. There’s a long horizontal seam at a relatively visible chest height, and each vertical seam is broken into two parts, which may not be precisely identical. The corners where the seams meet require particular care.
While spackling a smooth seam isn’t hard, horizontal seams demand more of you, and any flaws are more evident, especially as the house settles. A vertical hang creates only vertical seams between two sheets, which blend into the slight waviness that can arise over the decades. A horizontal hang may be more stable in the medium term (I don’t know that this is true, but it was asserted above by someone who probably has more experience tham I), but when defects arise, I would guess that they would be more evident, especially at seam crossings where four sheets meet.
I think you need to change vertical to horizontal in your first sentence. It took me a bit, and I know what you are saying, but I think you have ( || vertical) confused with ( = horizontal).
In the following -
Horizontal - =
Vertical - ||
It should read - ‘Drywall is generally recommended to be hung horizontally for two reasons’
But don’t let me put words in your mouth or nuthin.
The boards are hung horizontally and staggered (aka railroaded) to maintain the integrity of the seams while the house is settling. If the boards are hung vertically, a seam runs from floor to ceiling every 4’, but when railroaded this seam is broken up by the board under/above it. Granted this leaves a seam running the whole length of the wall, but unless this is the house that jack built, the wall isn’t going to warp that way.
On commercial jobs, the walls are glorified room dividers and non load baring so the drywall is hung vertically because it is faster, cheaper, and easier.
My guess is that sheet-rock is extruded continuously and is chopped off to length every 8 or 12 feet after the plaster has set enough to do so. At that point, it may be impossible to reshape the end edges to have a thinner profile.
IANADrywall installer or contractor, but when I lived in California, I was told the building codes as modified for earthquake preparedness required sheets to not only be mounted horizontally, but staggered. The horizonal mounting (that is, the long edge is horizontal) meshes with the vertical component of the studs to provide more rigidity. Likewise, staggering the starting edge of each sheet, even if that means some extra cutting, provides more structural strength when the tape and mud is added. A little like a brick wall – bricks are staggered for much the same reasons.
Personally, I hate drywall for its ugly factor. I have removed most of it from my current house and replaced it with wood.
Starting from the top down: Common sense. If you start from the bottom, you have to wedge the top piece into place snugly, which means it has to be cut perfectly and fitted into the gap between the lower drywall and the ceiling. Hard to get right, and would cause some fitting headaches. If you start from the top down, you’ve got lots of room at the bottom because of the baseboards. Easy to fit the drywall because you’re leaving a gap, and the baseboard will cover any minor fitting errors. It’s just a much smarter way to do it.
Hanging horizontally - I agree with everyone else, plus it’s more stable because the load of the sheet is spread across more studs. Drywall is heavy stuff and needs good support. If you hang it vertically, you’ll wind up drilling into the same studs on the ends with a whole bunch of screws. Plus, you can’t evenly space the center screws unless you’re going to screw the sheet in every 16". Again, laying the sheets horizontally and staggered just makes much more sense from a structural standpoint. More stable, no long uninterrupted seams, load spread across more studs.
All these good reasons why it’s hung horizontally raises the question why it is always hung vertically in Ireland (at least everywhere I’ve ever seen). If it’s the same stuff I’m thinking of, we call it “plasterboard”, it consists of gypsum packed between sheets of paper and it’s sold in sheets of 8’ x 4’. It’s generally attached to wooden battens or similar supports and hung vertically, so that the top edge abuts the ceiling, the bottom edge is behind the skirting board, and the joins are completely invisible after they are filled and the wall is coated with a skim of plaster and painted or papered.
It’s possible that buildings in Ireland use the sheetrock more as a covering, and the building structure might be made of stone, concrete block, or steel??? Bulidings in america are mostly made of 2x4 pine studs. I’m in America, so you tell me.
I think you’ve hit on exactly the right explanation, labdude. The houses are generally built of concrete blocks (usually cavity blocks or else a double layer with a 2 inch gap filled with insulating material). The inside walls are usually clad with drywall/sheetrock/plasterboard mounted on a frame of timber battens, and this provides a further degree of insulation as well as a nice smooth surface which can be plastered and decorated. For partition walls, which consist of sheets of plasterboard nailed to a timber stud frame, the plasterboard is also hung vertically, but it’s still not structural in this case.
Last time I worked in the home building industry (20 years ago, I admit) I couldn’t help but notice that the walls were 8’ high, the drywall was 8’ high, and one guy could lean a sheet of drywall against some studs and it would be flush with the ceiling and flush with the floor and with a hammer and a few nails he could pretty much do the job himself.
How you’d manage to do that by holding an 8’x4’ panel of sheet rock square against the ceiling with one hand while you hammer and nail with the other kind of defies my understanding. Even if a drill and some drywall screws makes it a lot easier.
When I finished my basement last year, needless to say I did it the “old fashioned way”. Although I must say modern spackle is incredibly easy to work with compared to the stuff we were using in 76.
To me, vertical makes more sense and it’s apparent that the manufacturers intended it to be hung that way. Otherwise the sheets would be tapered all the way around, no?
If there’s no taper at the ends, how does the tape and spackle not protrude from the rest of the drywall? That just looks bad.
Also, if structural integrity is an issue, then why drywall? I would hardly expect my house the remain standing in a catastrophy because of how I chose to hang my sheetrock.
I could be mistaken, but I think sheetrock was originally hung vertically as a rule.
The size of homes and therefore the length of the walls increased, so it permitted two men to use 12-16 foot sheets horizonally, which increased the speed it could be applied.
Hi, I have limited experience of using plasterboard but am willing to share my ignorance with anyone, I was taught that it should be hung vertically (I.E. || )
The reason is that, as Hibernicus mentioned, it is fixed to batons on a wall or a stud partition (that’s a frame of wood used for interior walls that are not load bearing). In either case, the batons or joists are always vertical so the edge of the plasterboard is nailed or screwed onto this. It covers half of the baton and the next sheet covers the other half so the edges are against a solid backing.
The edges are slightly indented so you put a special tape - it looks like a piece of netting- along the seam and plaster over it. Just plastering over the seams and nail holes is the minimum you need to do to give you a flat wall.
You start from the top as you always leave 1-1.5 inches at the bottom to allow for pipework etc to be hidden. This will be covered by skirting board.
[QUOTE=porkchop_d_clown]
How you’d manage to do that by holding an 8’x4’ panel of sheet rock square against the ceiling with one hand while you hammer and nail with the other kind of defies my understanding. Even if a drill and some drywall screws makes it a lot easier.QUOTE]
I’m dancin’ to your music there, porkchop. I just, and I mean, JUST finished refinishing the garage into a Family Room. I did the work alone, aside from a few deeply fugly moments that required all hands on deck. I hung the drywall alone. Vertically.
My house has been standing for 37 years. I somehow doubt there’s a lot of settling left in it. Since I tore to the cinderblock outer wall and started from there, I know there are zero foundation cracks to contend with. Didn’t seem to be a problem to hang vertically. Didn’t seem to be a problem to have lots of screws along the same stud, narrow-side out.
Taping? I suck like a fierce wind on a hot night. But, the one seam my friend the Pro did? It’s like buttah, baby. Mine are a bit…less subtle, shall we say? But the application of the drywall up against the studs went fine- and as noted, what the hell- 8 foot sheetrock, most walls are 8 foot high. Kind of makes sense that ( earthquake building codes aside ) you’d go with that flow.
