The walls are closing in: Drywall

The upstairs bathroom that the roommates will share is between two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms is the master, and it is connected to the bathroom by an open doorway without a door. Can you see the problem? If the roommate in the other room wants to use the bathroom, they will be seeing into the master, and that just doesn't work. 

In order to make this bathroom a "shared" bathroom, we need to either add a door or close up the wall. 

Adding a door would be nice for the next owners of the house when we sell because then the bathroom will still be connected to the master. EXCEPT, who wants to share a master bathroom with their child? Not me. 

The other alternative is having the roommate share the downstairs bathroom with the downstairs room. Then, you make the upstairs bathroom accessible from only the master. The problem with this is you expect your child (or roommate in our case) to walk all the way downstairs to the other bathroom, which is strange.... So you can see our dilemma. 

We decided, the best and most logical thing to do is close up the wall between the master and the bathroom. This would make the downstairs room the "master" because it has its own bathroom linked to it and the two upstairs rooms can share the upstairs bathroom equally. 

To begin closing up the wall, we cut away the drywall and the carpet from  around the he opening in order to see where we would link the new boards to. 

Then, we scraped off the excess drywall using a large putty knife/scraper in order to create a flat surface for the new drywall mud. 

 

Each beam in the wall is a standard 12" apart, so Brad and my dad framed out the new wall to this standard. 

Next, they put drywall sheets over the top of this framing and nailed it into the studs they just framed out and they started applying drywall mud over the creases using a puddy knife. 

This ^ was the first layer of drywall mud and it is the thickest. This layer takes about a day to dry, and it creates the most stability in the new drywall. The next layers of mud over the top are used to smooth out the lines of demarcation between the old and new wall. 

This ^ is the finished product, after the drywall mud was applied. We covered all of the nails and creases between the new and old wall. 

Now we wait for it to dry and for my dad to bring his texture machine over to spit the wall with texture. This next step is the finishing touch before the paint, that way the walls match perfectly!