Plaster Bored?

What an amazing thing plaster board is. It's like a wall held together by paper. The thin, sort of edible paper you get in church once a year, or which held in place a very small bit of sherbert in the shape of a 'flying saucer' when you were a kid, only thinner. And it holds this whole wall together. Amazing.

It's not advisable, therefore, to peel off the paper like the wrapper you thought it was because that doesn't then leave you with a pristine 'naked' wall. Oh no. What it leaves you with is dust. Quite a lot of dust and the solid (ish) wall you were hoping to find under the wrapper seems to have disappeared and reverted to its natural state. Dust.  White German dust.

It was like a Nigella tea party only in the bedroom. The Dyson choked several times. By the way, have you ever - being slightly unfamiliar with the concept of vacuuming - dismantled the thing to remove blockages and then wondered what that little red button did? Pressed it to find out and depositied all the crap you'd just hoovered up all over the bloody floor?

No? Me neither.

I didn't really 'peel' the plasterboard . That would have been stupid. Instead I measured it and marked it and scored it down one side and then it snapped, perfectly along the line I'd cut in the paper. It is simply, brilliant stuff. You just cut through the paper on the other side and you have a perfectly straight line to offer up to your sadly un-straight wall and wardrobe frame. Even I could do this. I even decided to eschew the hardboard I had left over to 'box in' the drawers from the hanging space and use plasterboard instead.

I know you're awaiting a calamity at this point, but there simply wasn't one. Sorry about that.

I shaved one of the double doors, well, marked it and started to shave it and then thought, 'why am I doing this?' I'm going to shave to the line I'd marked, why not just get the electric saw and cut to the same line? Which I did, and the off-cut (which amazingly came off in a single piece) has since been used to fill out the frame of the slightly too big gap in the drawer door (still with me?).

Make sure (serious point) that the floor you're cutting the plaster-board on is flat and doesn't have the debris of previous cuts underneath. It's delicate, works perfectly if you are tidy.

And you can then just screw through the plasterboard, no pre drilling required, and attach it to your frame.

Seven hours it took me to accomplish this, including shaving the door, but it was worth it. Instead of a rustic frame and some shelves, she now had a fully boxed-in wardrobe, work still to be done of course, but it was a transformation. And the double doors now fitted perfectly.

Instead of going upstairs with her when she got home from work to show her the progress I'd made, I simply sat downstairs and awaited the accolades.

Twenty minutes later she came down for supper; I sat expectantly, half smiling in anticipation of her amazement at the professionalism of my construction work.

'So, what have you been up to today?' she asked.

It was quite cold in the spare room last night, but I'm getting used to it.

To be continued..