Three Solo Drywall-Hanging Tips

In these three videos, Myron demonstrates a few tips for hanging a room full of drywall alone. In the first video, Myron demonstrates how to use the HangPro Drywall Lift for hanging drywall on walls without a helper.

Use a lift to eliminate the helper

• The drywall lift acts as a dolly for drywall. Set it next to the pile and place a sheet on the lift.
• Wheel the sheet over to the wall that you're working on, stop about 12-inches away from the wall.
• Tilt the lift forward, taking the weight off the larger wheels, and crank the drywall up until it butts the ceiling. The lift is somewhat flexible, in that if one corner of the drywall sheet touched the ceiling before the opposite corner, you can keep cranking to bring the other corner into position.
• With the sheet locked in place, screw off the top of the sheet.
• Remove the drywall lift and screw off the bottom of the sheet.
• The HangPro Drywall Lift can also be used for installing the lower sheet. After wheeling the sheet over to the wall, lower the sheet into position under the upper sheet and fasten the top of the lower sheet.

How to cut a long rip from a drywall panel without breaking it:

• Score the backside of the drywall with a knife, using a tape measure as a guide and your hand as a fence.
• Flip the sheet around and bend the cut edge forward to break the gypsum core.
• Score the face paper to remove the rip, BUT, do not begin scoring at the end of the drywall sheet. Begin scoring the face paper about two-0inches from the end of the drywall sheet. This two inches will hol;d the rip in place after scoring the rest of the panel.
• Do not score the face of the drywall sheet all the way to the end, either, stop about two-inches short of the end again.
• Now, move to the center of the panel and snap the rip back toward the back to break the two two-inch face paper sections at either end of the drywall.
• This will give you a perfect rip without breaking every time.

Don't create more mud work than you need to:

• Just because there are tons of studs in the wall does not mean you need to screw into them. Myron only screws into the layout studs—those 16-inches on-center. Extra studs get skipped because they just create more places that must be concealed with mud.
• Fasten edges at doors and windows close to the end of the sheet, so that the screws will be hidden by the casing. If you fasten a couple of inches from the end of the sheet, you'll need to conceal those screws with drywall compound.
• fasten the bottom of the sheet behind where the baseboard will be. Again, if you place the bottom screw more than 3-4 inches above the floor, you will most certainly need to conceal those screws too.

Little things add up over the course of a day, job phase, and project.