It’s finally happened – we put up a ceiling! We’ve had three large moisture resistant plasterboard sheets sat in our hallway for about a month and they are finally in place! We’ve never DIY plasterboarded before, so this was a first for us.
We chose moisture-resistant plasterboard (recognisable by its green colour) because of the moisture a bathroom generates. These are a bit pricier than your standard plasterboard (they cost an additional £5 per board!) but we figured it would hopefully be worth the extra and luckily, we only needed 3 sheets.
If you’re looking for a professional DIY ‘how-to’ post, then you might want to stop reading now. This was our first time ever plasterboarding, so it definitely wasn’t our best DIY job yet – but I think we did okay! The process is fairly straightforward, it’s just a bit fiddly when it comes to cutting angles and the weight (and size) plasterboard makes it a little awkward to install when upside down. (Aka on a ceiling!).
There are only 3 steps to cutting plasterboard though and they ridiculously easy:
1. Draw a line where you want to cut your plasterboard and score it with a knife, around 1/3 deep.
2. Push the board away from the cut you just made and it will snap into two.
3. Finish the cut along the other side and voila – you’re done!
So that was fairly straightforward but then we get onto actually installing the plasterboard. Depending on the size of the board, this can be pretty heavy and awkward!
You can buy plasterboard lifting tools like these support clamps which help with holding up plasterboard against the ceiling. But, they’re also quite pricey and you know how stingy we are!
So we opted for a slightly different method – a more DIY approach, you might say. We created our own support prop! And here it is…
We used two lengths of wood and fastened them together to create a T-shape. It’s slightly taller than the overall height of the room and although this won’t lift plasterboard for us, it will, however, wedge it against the ceiling! This means we won’t be simultaneously trying to hold it up, whilst screwing to the joists.
This idea worked MUCH better than we expected. Don’t get me wrong, it was still slightly awkward, but it helped a lot! I also recommend cutting plasterboard to smaller lengths so that they weigh less too.
Screwing the plasterboard into place was easy peasy from here onwards. Some of our cuts were a little off, but otherwise, it’s not too bad. We staggered the cuts and used a
And just like that – the job was done!
If you’d like to read a more up-to-date post on DIY fitting plasterboard, then check out this post!
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