Tried two ways to hang drywall solo and one saved me hours of frustration

I've been doing some basement finishing in my house and got sick of messing with drywall lifts that wobble. So for the first room I used a cheap T-bar lift I rented from Home Depot for like $35 a day. It worked but flipping panels up by myself still took forever and I kept having to readjust. For the second room I built a simple deadman brace out of 2x4s and some scrap plywood in about 20 minutes. It let me prop one end of the sheet while I positioned the other and I cut my hang time down from 3 hours per room to just under 2. Has anyone else found a weird homemade trick that works better than the store bought stuff for drywall?

2 comments

2 Comments

ruby_bell4710d ago

Tripped over my homemade brace three times before noon (that's on me, not the brace).

casey34210d ago

I gotta push back on that a little, @ruby_bell47. You're being too hard on yourself. A good brace should be designed so you don't trip over it no matter what. If you're stumbling three times before lunch, that's a design failure, not a user error. Homemade stuff is fine for some things, but for something you rely on every day, it's worth paying a little more to get one that's actually tested and balanced right. You can get a cheap commercial brace for under 30 bucks that won't have those sharp edges or weird angles. Don't let stubbornness make you keep breaking your face.