Drywall installation in Vancouver, from one room to a whole house

Board hung and finished to a paint-ready Level 4 generally runs $2.50 to $4.50 per square foot of wall and ceiling surface in Vancouver. A single room lands around $1,200 to $3,000, and a 1,000 square foot basement between $6,250 and $14,000.

The part that surprises people is not the rate, it is the area. Drywall is measured on surface, and surface runs roughly 2.5 to 3.5 times floor area once you count both faces of every partition plus the ceiling. So a 1,000 square foot basement is really 2,500 to 3,500 square feet of board. When a quote seems high against the size of the room, this is almost always the reason.

Vancouver also sits about 20 to 25 percent above the Canadian average on this work, so national cost calculators will under-quote you by a wide margin.

Replacing board in a room that already exists, inside your own house, does not need a permit. Two situations do, and both catch people out.

Finishing a basement needs a City of Vancouver building permit the moment framing, insulation, vapour barrier or drywall is involved. Paint, flooring and trim on their own are cosmetic and do not. Adding an interior partition needs a permit too, even where the wall carries no load, because once the wall is closed up an inspector cannot verify what went in behind it.

Separately, in a multi-unit residential building the City lists drywall repairs to fire separations as permit work, alongside structural repairs. If you are not sure which category you are in, the City's Development and Building Services Centre will tell you, and we will tell you what we think before we quote.

After two inspections pass, and this is the single most common reason a drywall start date moves in Vancouver.

The framing inspection comes first. It happens before any insulation goes in, and only after the sheathing membrane and all the plumbing, gas, electrical and mechanical rough-ins are complete, with framing, beams, fire blocking and draft stopping all visible. Then the insulation and vapour barrier inspection, once framing has passed and the insulation and poly are fully installed. The City's own guidance is that interior wall and ceiling finishes should not start until that second inspection is approved.

The inspector is checking vapour barrier continuity, poly boots on the electrical boxes, sealed duct joints and insulation on sprinkler pipe. Every one of those things vanishes behind drywall. Board early and you may be taking the walls back off, so we would rather move your date by three days than do the job twice.

Regular board is right for most walls and ceilings in a dry room and there is no reason to spend more. Where it changes: bathrooms, laundries, basements, ceilings with wide-spaced joists, and any wall carrying a fire or sound rating.

For damp rooms, the useful upgrade in Vancouver is a fibreglass-faced board rather than the old paper-faced green board. Paper is what mould eats, so removing the paper face removes the food. It adds roughly $0.30 to $0.80 per square foot, which is very cheap insurance in a coastal climate.

One thing worth being clear about: moisture-resistant board is not a tile backer. Inside a shower or a tub surround you want cement board or a proper tile backer board and a waterproofing membrane, not green board. Plenty of bathrooms in this city were built the wrong way round and the failure shows up five years later behind the tile.

Yes, and doing it during installation is the only sensible time, because every effective method needs the wall open. But it is worth understanding what actually works, because this is the area where people waste the most money.

There are four mechanisms and only four. Mass, meaning more weight in the wall, usually a second layer of board. Decoupling, meaning the two faces of the wall do not touch the same framing, using resilient channel or a double stud wall. Damping, meaning a viscoelastic compound sandwiched between two layers of board that turns sound energy into a tiny amount of heat. And absorption, meaning insulation in the cavity. Insulation alone helps and is the cheapest step, but it is the weakest of the four on its own.

What does not work is anything you paint or hang on the finished surface. Soundproof paint does nothing measurable. Foam panels absorb echo inside a room, which is a completely different problem from stopping sound getting through a wall. And the whole assembly is only as good as its weakest path, so a solid wall with a hollow door or an unsealed outlet in it leaks straight through. We would rather do one wall properly than four walls half way, and we will say so.

The hanging is fast. The finishing sets the schedule, because every coat of compound has to dry before the next one goes on.

A single room is realistically three to five days even though the hands-on work is a day or two. A basement runs two to four weeks for the drywall stage. Vancouver from October to March makes it slower: afternoon relative humidity averages 76 to 82 percent, compound needs at least about 12.8 degrees and moving air, and drying slows sharply as humidity climbs, so a coat can want 24 to 48 hours instead of overnight.

We manage that with heat and ventilation, and with setting-type compound where it makes sense, because it cures chemically rather than by evaporation and does not care much about the weather. What we will not do is rush coats. Compound that goes on over compound that is not dry is how you get cracked tape and lifting seams a year later.

We supply it, and it is included in the quoted price along with tape, compound, screws, corner bead and disposal.

You are welcome to supply your own if you have a reason to, and occasionally people do because a builder has an account. Two things to know if you go that route. We will not warrant material we did not choose, and getting the count wrong is expensive in a different way, because a second delivery for four sheets costs more than the sheets.

Delivery access is the practical issue nobody thinks about. Board comes in large heavy sheets, and getting them into a laneway house, up to a third floor, or into a tower suite through a booked freight elevator needs planning before the delivery, not on the morning of it.

Level 4 for almost every room. It is the normal paint-ready residential finish and it is what our quotes assume unless you tell us otherwise.

Level 5 adds a thin skim coat of compound across the entire surface, and it costs roughly $1.50 to $3.00 per square foot more. What forces it is not budget, it is light and sheen. The GA-214 standard calls for Level 5 with gloss, semi-gloss or enamel paint, with dark or deep tone paints, and under critical lighting, meaning light striking the surface at a shallow angle. In Vancouver that usually means a big window with low winter sun raking along a wall, or wall-washer and cove lighting.

Under flat paint in a room with ordinary windows, Level 5 is money you do not need to spend and we will tell you so. Where it does earn its keep is a feature wall in gloss, a dark accent colour, or a ceiling with pot lights washing across it.

We do steel stud framing, and we install batt insulation with the vapour barrier that goes with it. So on a basement or a partition job we can carry the framing, the insulation, the poly and the board as one scope.

That matters more than it sounds. When the insulation and vapour barrier inspection does not pass, and the insulator, the framer and the drywaller are three different companies, you get a week of everyone explaining why it is somebody else's problem. One crew means one person responsible for the wall passing.

What we do not do: load-bearing or structural framing, which needs a professional engineer, and spray foam or blown-in insulation, which is a different trade with different equipment. We will say so rather than taking it on.

We prime it. We do not quote finish painting, and that is deliberate rather than a gap.

Priming is the step that gets skipped and it matters. Bare joint compound is far more porous than the board around it, so it absorbs paint at a different rate and dries to a different sheen. That is flashing, and it is why a wall can look flawless right up until the moment it is painted. We prime so your painter starts from an even surface.

If you want the whole job under one contract, plenty of our clients have a painter they already use, and we are happy to coordinate the handover so the painter is not standing in a room that is still drying.

Yes, and it is regular work for us, including for strata councils and property managers. There are a few differences from a house worth planning for.

Concrete and masonry walls get steel furring channel rather than board fixed straight to the wall, which gives a flat plane and a cavity for services without fixing timber against damp concrete. Material handling is the other difference: sheets come up in a service elevator that has to be booked a day or two ahead, with common areas protected on the route.

The slowest part is usually approval rather than construction. Your strata will likely need to sign off in writing before anything starts, particularly where the work touches something the strata insures, and that realistically takes four to eight weeks. Start it early, and tell us the building when you call so we work to its rules from day one.

Rough-ins first, then insulation and vapour barrier, then drywall, then flooring, then paint and trim. Getting this wrong is one of the more expensive mistakes on a renovation and it happens constantly.

The specific traps: flooring before drywall means your new floor lives through the dustiest stage of the build, and drywall sanding is genuinely the messiest thing that will happen in that room. Painting before ceilings means painting twice. And booking your drywall start before the rough-in inspections have actually been called leaves you paying for a crew to stand around.

We will tell you what we think the sequence should be when we quote, even on jobs where somebody else is running the schedule. It costs us nothing and it saves the client real money.