Oh, they say “if only the walls could talk, the tales they could tell”.
Here is our story: It gets riveting. It gets screwed. It gets shot, lies on the floor and rises to the ceiling.
It is not the plot of Fifty Shades, it is the components in the drywall system.
Here are some interesting facts to give you an idea of the scale of this project: even with the open loft plans it still takes enough sheets of drywall to cover the equivalent of 9.12 full CFL fields or 13.89 full NFL fields, including end zones, to create the rooms in Glasshouse Skylofts. There are enough steel studs coming to site that if they were placed end to end they would reach from the Glasshouse Skylofts site to Grand Beach – and then still extend another 12 miles into the lake. There is enough drywall compound to be used to seamlessly cover the joints in the drywall to fill 29,167 Super Big Gulp cups (not that you would).
As the glass enclosure of the building grows floor by floor toward the top, that protection from weather allows drywall crews to complete the interiors of suites. The layout has been carefully considered to allow building services like plumbing lines, electrical services, communication wiring, heating, venting and lighting all to be efficiently encased without sacrificing the volume of space in each suite. A suite layout is measured on the floor planks, and a U shaped steel track is riveted into both the floor and ceiling with shots from a Hilti gun. As entire walls of steel studs are screwed into place, other trades follow closely behind. Electricians use precut openings in the steel stud to pull flexible conduit through to outlets and light fixture junction boxes. They web a magnificent silver string of veins for power to run safely from panels to points of use. The studs also have some horizontal stiffeners placed in the precut openings to add some structural rigidity. In kitchens and bathrooms, large sections of plywood are mounted between the studs to provide backing for the future cabinets.
So what appears to be a simple, clean wall infact is the bookcover for thousands of tradesman hours, numerous design refinements and enormous amounts of building services. Before you move in and enjoy the final clean drywall partitions they have already been journals for design sketches, notations of measurements and calculations, a few bad jokes and some colourful language, site messages and foreman instructions.
You actually knew the story couldn’t be the plot from Fifty Shades as soon as I said “it gets riveting”, didn’t you.