Fixing a hole where the rain gets in...

One thing you may not know about me is that I am not a professional drywall contractor. Nonetheless, I spent most of the day repairing the hole in my bathroom ceiling, with added bonus sub-activity of finding a better way to secure the shower to the ceiling. I imagine a professional could have done all this in an hour, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s professionals. Plus, a surgeon friend recently succeeded in patching a hole in HIS bathroom, and I didn’t want anyone saying that surgeons are smarter than shrinks. So I had to do the job myself. (Note to surgeon: my hole was in the ceiling, so I get extra points.)

I learned a lot. For example, did you know that drywall comes in both ½” and 5/8” thicknesses, which are separated by only 1/8"? (it’s true—do the math.) I wasn’t sure which flavor my ceiling was made out of, so bought a small piece of each. Back home, my drywall turned out to be somewhere between ½” and 5/8”. If that’s possible. So I had to shim up the new piece with wafers of wood.

Then I had all kinds of problems with screwing. I have never had problems with screwing before. But this job required screwing on the ceiling, at impossible angles, and using a screwdriver much shorter that my usual everyday screwdriver. Also I seemed to have a bag of bad screws. One of them snapped in half in a very inconvenient way, causing great delay.

Here are photos of the middle and end of the day’s work. I wish I had taken a “before” shot—but just imagine the appearance if, during a moderate rainstorm, a cannonball had fallen through the ceiling. That’s about how it looked.