Time or money.

Take your pick.

The only place scaffolding light be required is a stair well.

It is not used for regular walls and ceilings.

Rent a drywall lift, especially if he is working alone.

Stilts are also your friend for finishing.

Get them with an 'ankle function'.

You have a great argument but it's not working so I think you're doomed. :)

Sounds like he just wants to do it.

At least get him to complete it a room at a time and maybe you can move in before it's all done. (Also if he decides it's making him sore, it'll be easier to get a crew in to work on complete rooms than finishing up odds and ends.)

What is your husband better at, hanging or finishing or both? Time is the determining factor and you have made a good argument about costs that will offset the money saved by d.i.y. You might consider having a crew come in and hang it with you two doing the finishing if you are decent at it. We were going to hang ours but opted to have it hung out by a crew and we are finishing it out ourselves. Time was the consideration for us even though we are building slow, it gave us an inspection that countered having to re-permit which would have more than offset the savings of hanging it ourselves. It didn't break the bank to have them come in and hang it for us.

It's not a question of how long it will take him; it's a question of whether it will ever be finished. He needs to be realistic for the sake of others.

Also, I've never know an amateur to be able to match the work of a drywall pro no matter how often they have done it. I did the ceiling in my bedroom and later had a drywall contractor do the rest of the house. He suggested that he redo the ceiling and when I said no he offered to do it for free. Apparently he didn't want anyone to think he had done the work. And I thought I had done a perfect job.

IMHO the three things to never do yourself are wood floor finishing, roofing, and drywall. I'm sure there are other things that need to be done that are better suited to be done by an amateur over time without help.

brickeyee, seriously, stilts??? Hee, hee!!!Thanks for the cut & dried approach-you're right, it does come down to time or money.

Spoke to him at lunch-he pointed out that he doesn't want to do the drywall just to save money but he actually enjoys the work he's been doing on the house-guess I forgot about that but really, does ANYONE enjoy drywall??

Good advice fori and sierraeast! If he completes a room at a time, he may(or not)realize it's too much and hire a crew. Or we could decide to hang the drywall and get a crew in to do the mudding/sanding priming after(if that's possible). Does anyone know if crews would come in and do just this?
He definitely prefers hanging the drywall to all the finishing work.
I don't feel so doomed after all-just wish I got my way;)

I agree with fori to have him do one of the smaller rooms first completely to see how quickly it can be managed. He may get discouraged by the amount of work he's talking about taking on by himself. So, why is he taking it on by himself? With your help it can go surprisingly fast for two people. And if you truly want to save money, then instead of being critical of him taking on this job, help him do it.

At minimum, he'll want to purchase a drywall lift and stilts. Renting will cost more money than buying if you have to keep it longer than about 48 hours. You can always resell the equipment after you're done with it and make most of that money back.

I've hung and finshed miles of drywall and never enjoyed hanging it, especially by myself. If your husband enjoys it, take green's advise and team up on it and have it finished by pros. Sounds like a decent compromise for both of you!

So there really are stilts? Forgive my ignorance.heh, heh!

Yeah, I will help him(grudgingly) but he does prefer to work alone-it's been a bit of a struggle to work with him in the past but drywall really requires 2 people.

I agree about possibly buying the drywall lift. We live close to HD but their rental prices can often be ridiculous. I'll look into that and stilts.

I'm envisioning clowns in long striped pants walking in parades!

When my kitchen was remodeled, the GC had a specialist do the mudding/finishing (and buffoons do the hanging). It's amazing what a good mudder can do. I don't think they call theselves that.

The stilts might be fun. I've been tempted to buy them just because.

The pros use 12' sheets, they are in out of a room so fast it will make your head spin. And yes, tappers and plasterers do use stilts along with bakers (scaffolding). I just finished bath no.2 done differently than no. 1. No.1 hung dry wall and finished 2 weeks. Bath no. 2(same size) contracted, blue board and plaster done in 5 hours, no mess, no clean up, here is your check , good bye.
The way I look at it is what do I make an hour and what are my stock costs. No brainer,the pros generally get a better price on stock than Joe homeowner and I make a bit an hour more than these guys.If I make a mistake, I'll fix it later. If they make a mistake, its do you want to get paid.

We're intrepid DIY-ers that have redone every square inch of our house. But we hire out the drywall. I recall one evening early on in our remodel, Mr. Weedy was at work and I was sanding a closet wall. Sweating, dust in the eyes, poor lighting, I was miserable. I called him and said "if you love me you'll never make me do drywall again." So we've hired it out ever since.

I don't mind hanging it, but most pro drywallers like to do it themselves so they get the seams the way they want. I'm fine with that. For me, of all the trades, drywallers are the best bang for the buck. Not terribly expensive and big time savers. It seems like a lower skill trade on the surface, but they can make a wall, corner or seam look way better than I can. It's a true art.

Plus, unless you're really good at it, you will have cracks at the joints in a few years. Very common in DIY jobs.

IMHO the three things to never do yourself are wood floor finishing, roofing, and drywall.

I did one pine subfloor in a house that was torn down the next year. No customer but me would have accepted the job! But I rather enjoyed re-doing the low-slope one-storey roof at one of my cottages, along with two helpers. Perfectamente with all the fiddly details. Drywall never!

Doing it once helps you appreciate the real pros .

In a project management 3,200 sf house with a partially finished basement I built the wife kept insisting she wanted to paint it herself.

"You don't think I can do it? I've painted houses this size before and I can do this one too."

"I am woman. Hear me Roar!"

Since this was two months before they had to leave their rental, the husband , I think, finally dissuaded her. It took a four man crew of pros at least three weeks to complete the job to perfection.

Good luck Lily!

Pros hang drywall so fast you will be astounded. Once, in the time it took to review the project with the boss, his men installed the board in the first room. I only stick around to be sure they don't cover up a recessed light or something (it happens) but it is sometimes difficult to stay out of their way.

So, it would be plain silly to hang the board and then pay for taping IMHO.

Taping is time consuming and very dusty. In my area all drywall is "veneer plaster" on "blueboard" which is cheaper, has a harder finish, is better looking, holds paint better & longer, takes one day and makes little or no dust compared to taped drywall. Unfortunately it requires talent as well as experience. Therefore DIY taped drywall is rarely justifiable here.

You can live in rooms once the drywall is hung.
It is not all that attractive, but it closes up the walls.

Stilts allow you to finish a ceiling and the upper portions of walls without moving a ladder or scaffolding over and over.

Scaffolding is more useful if you are plastering (or even skim coating) since you need to run tooling over every square inch of the surface.

A lot of it is just historical though.
Plaster installers commonly used scaffolding long before stilts, so they continue that.
Drywall workers needed something faster and cheaper.
Stilts came into the picture.
They are not all that high, and are very different than the 'play' type stilts you may have seen.
They attach to the shoe and calf only.
Good ones are a spring loaded parallelogram type structure that make walking easy.
They flex and allow the ankle to function.

And we are not kidding about the stilts.

Here is a link that might be useful: stilts

"Taping is time consuming and very dusty"

An experienced finisher needs little or no sanding throughout the process of finishing drywall. Dusty, doesn't have to be...messy, it can be a tough clean up when a subfloor isn't covered. Concrete slabs are an easy clean without having to be covered.

What fires electricians more than shocks are when a finisher runs their bazooka wide open over light switch boxes at the 4' seam completely filling them with mud. They should be taped off as well.

I am currently involved in a very large reno. 120,000 sq ft of office space, the general contractor sent the dry wall out to bid. The bid is based on sheets hung and finished, that's why these guys fly.They do not sand. Upper sheets always hung first (on walls), irregularities are removed from the bottom which will be covered with base board.
Generally in this area veneer plaster is residential and dry wall for commercial,a lot of these guys do both.
The first time I saw stilts used I was a little surprised. These guys took breaks and ate lunch without removing them.

I remember when stilts were outlawed here. But limited use of stilts was legalized again just last year in Ontario.

Not that I haven't seen them used clandestinely in small jobs during the interim 40 years.

The final key in the legalization was a University study concluding that there was less muscle strain and injury in stiltwalking than in using benches.

Here is a link that might be useful: Stilts legalized in Ontario

Wow, having seen the guys in stilts I can't imagine why they'd be outlawed! They seem so easy to use & less dangerous than scaffolding (you'd fall over as opposed to falling down). They might not actually be less dangerous, but they just seem that way to me (at least you'd never walk off the edge of them).

"Wow, having seen the guys in stilts I can't imagine why they'd be outlawed! "

The very old ones can be pretty bad.

The new type is very comfortable and not hard to learn to walk in.

The springs and parallelogram construction lets them flex just enough without being wobbly when standing and pushing with your arms.

You will notice that the good ones are a little pricey, upwards of $250 a set.

Enjoys drywalling? More power to him. I'll be surprised if he still enjoys it after doing a whole house alone though. He'll probably soon be cured of ever wanting to drywall again.

He sounds like me though. And like you, my wife can be skeptical about my ambitions. But while she's often right, I love her for letting me have at it.

Drywall is a young man's trade. Young backs and limbs are a necessity. I think the best application of his efforts would be to apply the primer an do the "point-up" (repair of small drywall flaws made obvious after the primer is applied). Then you get a fast & good job and add the final quality control yourselves.
Casey

"He'll probably soon be cured of ever wanting to drywall again. "

Very likely.

One room is a job. Two or three starts taking a toll.

A whole house really needs a team.

It is a lot easier hauling drywall sheets around with an assistant.

If the walls are bare you need to at least try and position enough sheets in each room for that room.

It is a lot easier to move them when the walls are open, than trying to navigate past partly completed areas without damage.

My husband rented a dry wall machine that raised the sheets to the ceiling and allowed for quick attaching. He would never be able to walk on stilts. LOL

He installed then realized to save time we needed to hire help to tape and paint, so that's what we did. Saved an enormous amount of time.

"He installed then realized to save time we needed to hire help to tape and paint,"

The full tine drywall installers I use for larger jobs will not touch anything they have not installed.

They tried taking work that was already hung a few times, and ended up over budget from all the errors in hanging.

One of the biggest problems was failure to level stud faces.

Following my partner's practice in trying to save money above all, I used to buy materials, then hire boarders and tapers separately. This resulted in an endless round of fingerpointing.

Now, it's one contract. The drywall contractor sees the framing before starting and asks for any corrections. Then it's his responsibility to board and tape it to a stage acceptable to the painting contractor.

But every diyer is convinced they know better. Good luck to them!