Studio Project Drywall

Sunday night after another busy weekend.  I didn’t get as far as I wanted but made steady progress on the office area in my studio.  Below is a photo tour of what I did this weekend including adding an outlet and starting the drywall installation.  This desk area is primarily a catch all for the office space.  I found a really cool outlet at Lowes.  On the bottom is a regular outlet but on top instead of another outlet there are two USB jacks so we can charge our phones and other USB devices without the need for an adapter.  Very cool indeed; $20 at Lowes.  Another cool product I picked up there were dry wall corners that are made from metal and covered in drywall tape.  That way I didn’t need to screw metal corners on and try to mud over the metal.  I simply put down some drywall mud, squish the corners in and then cover in mud.  For an amateur like me these integrated corners were really easy to use and made the job simpler.  I got pieces for both the inside and outside corners.  I’ll even use them on the top of my freestanding wall.

One bad thing I noticed was somehow my calculations or my craftsmanship failed me.  The 48″ space I need for the office counter top is closer to 48.5″ – 49″ which means I need to figure out how to finish off the gap I’ll most likely have.  I had our countertops premade so it’s not like the counter will just go wall to wall.  I’ll figure it out, there’s not much I can do about it now.  Also I’m looking at my sink on the end wall and going to plan on a redesign of some sort.  That counter may need to be remade as I didn’t have the sides of the counter laminated….once again, we’ll see.  Better planning would have helped but I had a design in my head, seeing it in person I think I want it another way.  No big deal.  Live and learn.

Photo show of the weekends festivities…

I screwed down a 1/2″ piece of plywood to act as my subfloor under the cabinets.

From the base of the cabinet to the edge of the existing floor…I’ll need to infill with about five inches of yet to be determined flooring material. The current wood floor is about 3/4″ thick. I’ll put 3/4″ spacers under the cabinets..I don’t think I need to run “floor” under the cabinets.

Here I’ve nailed an electrical box in place. The 2×4 above it…I added that to reinforce my wall cabinet attachment.

Here I added a nailer to screw my access panel to. Also it gives the drywall on the other side some support.

I was wise to take some video of the house before the drywall was put on the house originally. Here I can see the wiring and pipes in the wall…helps me navigate adding my new outlet and where I can run the wire.

You can see this is where I ran the wire for the new outlet.

Wires stripped and ready for hooking up.

Wires hooked up to the new charging station outlet.

Outlet ready to go (though not hooked up at the other end yet.

First piece of drywall installed around sink area.

Another piece of drywall installed. I had several pieces leftover from construction that I was able to use.

I used my trusty jab saw to cut out the opening for the outlet, after measuring its location.

Our happy charging outlet.

Office space dry walled.

These handy drywall corner strips make life a lot easier. Best thing I bought in a while. I just laid down some mud, squished the corner in place and them covered and smoothed it our with mud.

First coat of mud done….wait to dry.

Bookcase will go to the left. This wall will have the wall cabinet and sink base.