Get The Edge With T-Square For Sheetrock Edge On Sheetrock
When we go down to the local hardware store or home center, we are faced with a vast array of stuff. And a lot of it is the newest, hottest stuff, just begging for our dollars, sitting right there, waiting to make our lives fuller, our children smarter and neighbors fraught with envy.
Weed Weasels, deck washers, electric paint strippers, screwdrivers that will screw better, wrenches that will wrench better … when the actual truth is, most of the basic devices that have existed for eons do the best job, cost the least, and last the longest.
I, for one, will think long and hard before I buy another screwdriver with a built-in flashlight, or a super multi-grip socket set with a vastly greater number of grabbing surfaces that will make me a better person.
That is why, on the occasion that I run across really genuinely useful stuff, I will pass that discovery along.
And all the past week, I’ve been thinking fondly of my sheetrock T-square.
Now probably, this is not new stuff at all. Probably these things have been around for decades. But I only found out about them recently, and my sheetrock T-square has given me many hours of faithful and unpretentious service.
It makes no extraordinary claims. It doesn’t offer to turn me into a master sheetrocker, or make me smell better or upgrade my virility.
It is what it is a T-square. And it only costs about $14.
The short leg is offset slightly from the long leg, perfect for resting on the side of a piece of sheetrock. The long leg is 48 inches, the exact width of a piece of sheetrock. And the long leg is marked off in inches, starting at 1 on one side up near the short leg, and starting at 1 on the other side at the opposite end. So you can slap that sucker on a piece of sheetrock, and instantly measure precisely from either direction.
Before my T-square, I had to measure pieces of sheetrock by draping a tape measure down from one edge, making a mark, and then going to hunt for a straightedge to guide the cut.
But you’re never quite sure that the tape is exactly at a 90-degree angle, so you don’t know if your measurement is just enough off so that when you put the sheetrock up on the wall, it sticks at the bottom, by the baseboard. And then when you kick it to make it slide in that last fraction of an inch, it breaks on a jagged angle, and you have to fill up the hole with a whole bunch of sheetrock mud that keeps falling back into the wall cavity before it dries.
With the T-square, though, the angle is always 90 degrees. Put the T-square on one side of the sheetrock, make the mark for your first measurement, then put the sheetrock on the other side, align it with your mark, and it gives you the perfect straightedge along which to guide your utility knife.
Your sheetrock still might be a fraction too long, and you still might break it trying to kick it into place, but that will be due to man’s inherent inability to measure things accurately, and not the fault of your instruments.
Relating to a recent column on the joys of caulk, MarionEL emails:
“My daughter put a new faucet in the sink (by herself) and used some sort of unknown caulk. It’s turning an ugly yellow, pulling away and crumbling at one end. What should she have used?”
First, I want to make clear that there’s nothing wrong with putting in a new faucet by yourself. It’s perfectly natural. It won’t make you go blind. That’s just a myth perpetuated by the nuns at Catholic plumbers schools so people won’t try to do plumbing on their own.
Second, you should almost never buy unknown caulk. Unknown caulk might be the work of caulk counterfeiters who don’t care a whit whether your handiwork turns an ugly yellow and pulls away and crumbles.
Third, when caulking around sinks, tubs, showers and other applications where the caulk will be in frequent contact with water, you should use a silicone caulk. These tubes are typically labeled as “bathroom and kitchen” caulk.
And don’t worry. Your daughter will be fine.
Everybody does it at one time or another.