bathroom construction

Our little slice of the american dream has been in a constant state of renovation since we bought it. So with a new child on the way we've been trying to get the interior remodeling finished before B-day. Well, with 8 weeks left before parenthood I needed assistance in hanging the cieling in the freshly demolished & re-walled upstairs bathroom. My good 'ol Dad donated his time to help us out. Now I have to tell you that out house was constructed by people who knew nothing about carpentry. None of the walls were "true" or "Plumb", both terms for being straight & square. See, most rooms are square or rectangular in nature. They require 90 degree angles to make construcing them easy. When care isn't taken by a carpenter & the room isn't made with true 90 degree angles cutting the sheetrock for walls or cielings can be a real hardship. During the demolition of our upstairs bathroom I decided to sheetrock over the old cieling & not rip it out. Since we couldn't see the studs to nail into, so we had to use a stud finder to "see" where they were. Common practice is that a stud should be in a wall or cieling every 16". Well in our cieling it's 16", then 13.5" then 19"... not too good... Because (pronounced bee-cawse in Jersey) the walls were 3" out of square (the room was very trapozoidish) we had to use a roll of 4' wide brown paper to make a series of templates that we stapled & taped to the cieling in order get a realistic idea of what we were dealing with. Then we took the templates & taped them to sheets of sheetrock. We cut out the shapes of the templates, walked them up the stairs & screwed them into place. Chalk lines were snapped & screws were sunk. 7 hours later, our cieling was hung!! Thanks Dad!!