A.Myron Ferguson
responds: I often see drywall hung vertically
in garages and workshops, which typically have high
ceilings and walls longer than 16 feet (the longest
available length of drywall). For your job, you
could also buy 9-foot-long drywall, and then you
wouldn't have any waster.
Another option is to use 54-inch-wide drywall,
which is made for horizontal attachment on
9-foot-high walls. It's available only in 12-foot
lengths, but this may work out fine if you locate
the butt seams above doors or above and below
windows. The 54-inch drywall is available in both
standard 1/2-inch thickness and 5/8-inch fire-code
thickness, in case that is an issue.
My first choice would be to use 54-inch board
because I prefer taping horizontal seams. Plus,
even when you include any butted seams, you may
actually end up with fewer lineal feet of seams to
tape. My second choice would be vertically oriented
4-by-9-foot drywall. If you install it this way, be
careful not to place a seam on an outward crowned
stud, and double-check your stud spacing to be sure
that you won't have to cut off a beveled edge to
hit a stud.
My last choice would be to hang 48-inch-high
drywall horizontally. Not only does this approach
generate the most lineal feet of seams to tape, but
locating the seams is a problem: Seams up at the
top or low along the floor are inconvenient to
tape, while a double seam in the middle is
difficult to hide.
For really tall rooms — like the
20-foot living room I'm doing right now —
I hang the board horizontally, because otherwise
it's nearly impossible to tape. It's standard to
put on the stilts or work off scaffolding to tape
the joints horizontally around the room, whereas
trying to tape a joint that starts 20 feet high at
the ceiling and runs down to the floor is nearly
impossible.
Another advantage to running the board
horizontally in tall spaces is that it allows me to
bridge the junction between floors. I'll start with
a 2-foot rip at the bottom if necessary so that a
full-width board covers the joist area at the floor
junction. I also avoid screwing into the band
joist, because that's the most likely place for
shrinkage and pops.
Myron Ferguson is a drywall contractor in
Galway, N.Y., and the author of Drywall:
Professional Techniques for Great Results.