A Small and very handy tip. (DIY in general)

Member Name: ANDREWSJK

Product:	DIY in general
Date:	21/08/01 (3734 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap., Saves on going out. , Cheap fancy dress gear !!

Disadvantages: Hurts your neck., Ruins your love life., Not the normal way I like to get plastered.

After much pressure to do another op in my continuing series on home repairs, here it is, how to replace a ceiling. The first thing one needs for this is a ceiling that needs replacing, I would not recommend tearing down a perfectly good ceiling for a bit of practice, or because ANDREWSJK told you to on Dooyoo.

Now, ANDREWSDADHK, who is selling his house for a smaller one at the ripe young age of 74, had just the ceiling to experiment on, so the saga begins here. The next requirement for this bit of practical exercise is plenty of really old clothes, as will be revealed. We begin by pulling down the remains of the former ceiling with the aid of hammers, chisels, whips, leather bondage gear and any other implement which may prove useful. You may wish to protect your head and eyes from falling masonry, that is if you wish to use them again after this op.

Well, I started off looking pristine in my twenty year old tracksuit, but having pulled the old ceiling down, I went to see ANDREWSMUMEM, and said "Mame !" , and she said "Blimey, it's Al Jolson, give us your autograph and sing another song !". Me and my dad did a few rounds of "Swanee" in the garden, before I signed her autograph book. She then said "I recognise you, you're my son, go and have a bath ". An hour later, having had a bath and filled it with tons of brickdust I was back to my normal colour.

The next task was clearing all the rubble away, there will be a vast amount of this, we managed to fill several wheelie bins. By this time of course their house was full of the first of many thick layers of dust. The following task is to buy the requisites for the job. These were :-
1. 4 sheets of plasterboard.
2. 2 bags of finishing cement.
3. Plenty of screws
4. Plenty of nails.
5. Roll of plaster tape.

While I was banking my Dooyoo cheque, ANDREWSDADHK decided to nail the first sheet of plasterboard to the ceil
ing, and as it is slightly superfluous I will omit this part. On my return we decided to continue with the second board. The idea is to stagger the boards across the ceiling to give added strength, and to avoid a continuous line across the room, which may become a weakness and cause cracking, a little like crazy paving really. How he got the first one up is not entirely clear to me. Anyway we struggled and heaved with the second one, and eventually got it loosely into place so that the hole where the wires for the lighting were to go could be ascertained, and cut the necessary holes in the plaster board.

Then, we placed the wires through the hole, and struggled and heaved the board back up, which is approximately 6 feet by 4 feet, and tacked it into place with several nails. Now, dad started to hammer the rest of the nails through the plasterboard into the ceiling beams. While he did this I looked around for something to read, and there being no Sun available, I decided to read the writing on the plasterboard. There was some nice pretty stencilling on it which said "Decorate other side". I asked ANDREWSDADHK what this meant and he said "Oh dear !", or more precisely " Gardening, farming dear !". That's sort of what it sounded like, and there was some reference to some type of cow.

I didn't understand this, not being the technical sort, but the net result was taking the whole lot down again. I'm not sure if the first go was practice or not, but there were certainly plenty of nails to take out.
Well, four hours of the weekend had been wasted, good job I wasn't going to a Dooyoo presentation to not collect a Crown !!

Refreshed after a meal, we proceeded to put these nice pieces of plasterboard up, the other way this time, with the WHITE side showing, and firmly nailing all of them to the beams. Must have used a couple of hundred nails in the end. The following day, we screwed the corners o
f the plasterboard into the lathes underneath, these are thin pieces of wood as this is a 100 year old house. The idea of this is to get all edges flush to each other before continuing, to obtain a nice smooth finish. Half way through I was sent to the builders merchant to get some more screws. I said to him "Twenty number 8's ", and he said in his best public school voice, " This ain't no tobacconists", to which I replied, "I know you twit, I want twenty number 8 size screws, 1 inch long !". Aren't some people stupid ??

Having achieved a whole series of nice smooth edges, we then covered all the edges with the tape, which is a little like plaster of paris, and covers all the recesses and gives a good key for the plastering job to come.

That was the whole weekend gone, now into the next saga, the plastering. Here was I in another set of old clothes, mixing up the plaster in a bucket with a large wooden mixing spoon like Fanny Craddock. About one pound of plaster to a pint of water, but this varies quite a lot. Stir and stir, just as if you were making a stir fry in a wok, though you definitely wouldn't want to eat this stuff !! Everything is all ready for the off once the mixture is nice and stiff. Then I handed the plaster on a board to ANDREWSDADHK, who was standing on a table so that he could slap this stuff on the ceiling. Needless to say we were getting covered in quite a bit of the stuff as it came loose, ANDREWSMUMEM stood us out in the garden every night like garden gnomes while she chipped the by now hardened plaster off of us.

Once a reasonable area of the ceiling has been covered with the plaster, it should be smoothed level and smooth like a baby's bottom. Well, without a baby handy to keep rubbing across the ceiling, dad used a large flat plasterers trowel. To make the thing nice and smooth takes for ever, and the patience of my bank manager, i.e few people have got it !!
Well, needless to say this whole exercise took longer than expected, about two weeks longer in fact !!

Final task is to paint the finished job, yet another chance to get myself completely covered in paint and muck The morale of this story is, if in doubt claim on your insurance. Jewels did suggest this to me, which I definitely promise I passed on, but dad wouldn't listen, thought he could do it cheaper than the insurance excess would cost.

Well, now you know how to Very Usefully Replace a Ceiling, but don't blame me if every Dooyoo member ends up without ceilings in their houses.

Next op in this series, how to clean up an entire house from dust and rubble after having replaced a ceiling.

Summary: