How Buttboard Boosted Efficiency for This Barndominium

The project: Building a barndo in rural Wisconsin

In Amery, Wisconsin, a local family has taken “DIY” to a whole new level. With a dream of living in a barndomium — an increasingly popular trend in residential construction, combining the open floor plans, high ceilings and folksy charm of a barn with all the comforts of a modern home — Keirsten Armstrong decided, rather than sitting around waiting for the perfect barndo to magically appear, she and her family would just build one themselves.

With Keirsten and her husband serving as both owners and GCs on this project, they planned and built the entire structure from the ground up — from purchasing the land, securing financing, obtaining permits, hiring subcontractors wherever needed and everything in between.

With incredibly high ceilings and huge, open runs of unbroken drywall — creating a whole lot of seams and butt joints — this job would be no easy task for even a seasoned drywaller. In fact, most of the local drywall companies in the Armstrongs’ area refused the job, saying the ceilings were too high.

Thankfully, the Armstrongs were able to connect with a team of ambitious drywall pros who were up for a challenge — including the people at Hesser Drywall, Drees Drywall and Drywall Jesse.

The product: ‘Easier, more efficient’ Buttboard

Among other Trim-Tex beads and accessories (more on these in another story coming soon), there was one solution we manufacture that would prove to be a major component of this story: Buttboard Drywall Backer.

Why? When you attach drywall’s cut ends to Buttboard — an OSB product uniquely engineered to taper toward the middle — rather than directly to the framing, it pulls that butt joint back into a flatter surface. So, instead of spending a ton of time and joint compound on compensating for the hump a butt joint normally creates, you’re using about half that time and material to finish the joint — like you would on a seam created by two factory-cut, tapered drywall edges.

“What we'll do is, we'll take this Buttboard we'll stick it behind the butt joint in between our studs,” explains Chad Hesser of Hesser Drywall. “When we get it all screwed in, it turns into a flat. That way, we're not finishing both sides of the drywall, and we can also hang continuously without staggering our seams — we can line up our sheets all together and take less measurements. So, at the end of the day, it'll make it easier, more efficient for the hangers and the finishers.”

The payoff: ‘It helps the hangers be more efficient with hanging, and the finisher be more efficient with finishing’

In a massive, wide-open space like this barndominium, you’re creating dozens of butt joints just to cover the outer walls. So, for a process that might take you 10 minutes, cutting that down to five minutes for every single butt joint in the residence adds up to colossal time and material savings, both for the crew hanging the drywall and the crew finishing it.

For the hangers, as Chad mentions, Buttboard makes it so they don’t waste time, wasting a lot of perfectly good drywall along the way, precisely measuring and cutting each sheet so it lands on a stud. 

For the finishers, with a Buttboard-backed butt joint, they can typically get away with finishing it with little more than a 12” flat box, rather than spending the time and mud feathering out each joint to make them appear flat.

As Chad tells us of Buttboard, “It is used to help the hangers be more efficient with hanging and the finisher be more efficient with finishing.”

Thank you to everyone at the Amery barndominium for inviting us to be part of this awesome project. You can follow all the updates on the Armstrongs’ DIY barndo here, and see everything Hesser Drywall gets up to here. Have questions? Visit our Buttboard FAQ here. To get your hands on a box of Buttboard, use the tool below to find a trusted Trim-Tex supply dealer near you!