New Construction Drywall in Conroe, TX: Builder Packages, Hang and Finish | Conroe Drywall Co.

What a New-Construction Drywall Package Covers

New construction drywall is the first finished surface a building receives. Until we arrive, the house is still framing, wire and pipe with every wall and ceiling left as an open cavity. That is what all of the work below has in common: nothing has been finished before, so there is no old surface to match, no existing board to cut into and no previous crew's work to inherit. If your building already has finished walls, the job is drywall installation in an existing house or drywall repair instead, and each requires a different approach.

The people who call us are the ones managing the build schedule. Production builders put us on a run of houses, custom builders bring us one house at a time, and general contractors carry our price into a larger contract. You may also be an owner-builder, managing your own house and hiring each trade directly. The scale runs from a single spec house to an entire subdivision phase, but the price is built the same way either way: material, labor, finish and haul-off, quoted from the plans as one total.

Production Homes in a Subdivision Build-Out

A production home is one of many houses built from the same set of plans, and that repetition changes the economics. We measure the plan once, count the board once, and carry that takeoff across every house in the phase, so you are not paying for a new material count at each address. The finish is specified once as well, which means your painter meets the same surface in house twelve as in house one.

By the third house, the crew knows where every awkward ceiling and tight closet falls, so the hanging moves faster without anything being skipped. Homes in a master-planned subdivision such as Grand Central Park or Graystone Hills are released in runs rather than on fixed dates, so we quote the work per house and take our place in the queue.

Custom and Semi-Custom Homes

A custom home has no precedent anywhere on the site. Every ceiling height, soffit and return is specific to that house, so we build the takeoff from your plans instead of reusing one. The finish level is chosen for that house as well, rather than carrying over whatever the last job used. Tall great-room walls and open stairwells require staging before we can hang a sheet, so that labor is counted accordingly. More openings and angles also mean more board cut to shape and more corner bead along the edges. Tray ceilings, arches and niches, soffits and bulkheads all belong to this kind of build.

Garages, Attic Access and the Spaces That Get Skipped

Two bids on the same house can differ by thousands, and the garage is usually the reason. One price includes it and the other does not, yet nothing on the page tells you which is which. Garages are commonly hung and taped but left without the texture and final finish used in the living space, so a bid that includes the garage still may not finish it to the same standard.

The same applies to attic scuttles and pull-down stairs, whose surrounds take enough extra work to be counted separately, as well as mechanical closets, under-stair spaces and laundry walls, which are easy to miss on a takeoff. Your garage also requires a code-mandated separation from the house. Ask us, and anyone else bidding the job, exactly which rooms are included in the price.

What Comes With the Package and What Does Not

A builder package is a list of line items, and ours takes your house from bare framing to a surface ready for the painter to prime. We supply the board, have it delivered and stocked inside the house, then hang it, tape and float the joints, sand them and apply the texture. Corner bead, joint tape and joint compound are included in that same material line. Once the finishing is complete, we haul away the scrap and leave the house broom-clean.

We normally supply the gypsum board ourselves rather than asking you to buy it, which keeps one party responsible for both the material and the work done to it. Our price does not include priming and painting, drywall insulation, trim or the final coat of paint, since each belongs to a separate trade and a separate scope on your build.

Tape and Float on a New Construction Drywall Job

Hanging the board is the fast part. A crew can cover a house in a few days, and then the slower half of new construction drywall begins: tape and float, the work of bridging every seam and covering every screw head with joint tape and joint compound until the surface looks like one continuous wall. Every stage below depends on the same thing. Joint compound is mostly water, and it cannot be sanded, coated again or painted until that water has left. What you are waiting on is not a crew moving faster but the wall drying, and in Conroe that takes longer than a schedule built for another climate assumes.

Three things determine how long that wait lasts. The weather controls how quickly each coat releases its water, the finish level written on the plans determines how many coats are required, and the selected wall texture, whether knockdown, orange peel or another finish, goes on once those coats are complete.

Coats, Cure Time and Conroe Humidity

A taped seam receives three coats: the first embeds the joint tape in compound, and the next two spread wider so the buildup tapers away gradually instead of standing as a ridge. Joint compound hardens by releasing its water into the surrounding air, so air that is already carrying a great deal of moisture slows that process. That is the normal condition here, and a new house has no permanent air conditioning to dry it because the equipment is usually not running yet and the site is still on temporary power.

ASTM C840, the standard covering gypsum board installation and finishing, sets a cold-weather rule for this: when outside temperatures are low, the building is held at 50 degrees Fahrenheit for the 48 hours before joint treatment begins and continuously afterward until the compound is dry, because compound that gets too cold partway through never develops its full strength and later cracks along the seam. Here, that matters in winter. The rest of the year, the issue is not cold but the moisture already in the air. We use fans, temporary heat and dehumidification to keep the house within the required range, which is what keeps a wet week from pushing back your paint date.

Where humidity stops drying-type compound from curing properly, we switch to setting-type compound, which hardens through a chemical reaction on its own schedule rather than by releasing water into the room.

The Finish Level the Plans Ask For

How smooth your walls end up is decided on paper, not by how careful the crew feels that week. GA-214 sets the finish scale used across the trade, and each level describes how far compound is carried over joints and fasteners, from a single embedding coat to a coating across the entire surface. Most houses built around here are specified to a level intended for texture, because texture breaks up light across the wall and hides the seams beneath it, which is why nearly every spec house receives it.

That finish level belongs in the plans so every bidder is pricing the same scope. Before you compare one bid with another, ask which finish level each price assumes.

Level 5 on a New Build, and When It Is Worth Paying For

Level 5 is the finish upgrade you are most likely to be asked about. It adds a thin skim coat of compound across the entire wall rather than only over the joints, so paint absorbs at the same rate everywhere. Without it, the compounded bands absorb differently from the bare paper around them, allowing the seams to show faintly through the paint. That extra uniformity earns its cost on walls finished in flat paint with no texture, especially in stairwells and rooms with tall windows where light crosses the wall at a shallow angle and throws a shadow from anything standing proud.

On a textured wall, you are generally paying for an upgrade no one will see. The test is simple: stand where the light will fall and look along the wall rather than straight at it. We price Level 5 as an additional cost per square foot on top of the finish already specified.

Debris, Dust and What a New Construction Crew Leaves Behind

Hanging a house produces scrap equal to roughly a tenth of the board that goes in, and all of it has to go somewhere. Offcuts from around windows and doors, the banding the sheets arrived in and empty joint compound buckets leave with our crew instead of going into your dumpster. That is worth checking on any bid, because gypsum scrap is dense and heavy, and a pile that looks small fills a dumpster much faster than you would expect.

A builder who absorbs that cost on every house is paying for a dumpster pull that was never in the budget. Haul-off is included in our new construction drywall work and priced into the builder package.

Sanding coats the building in fine white dust, and that dust settles on every horizontal surface it reaches. We sweep and vacuum the house before the punch walk rather than after it, so you are looking at the finish itself instead of a film over it. Broom-clean is the standard we use at handoff, which means the painter can start that day. It does not mean the house is fully finished or that no dust will appear again once other trades move back in.

Dust Control While the House Is Still Open

Sanding a whole house creates more dust than any other stage of the build, and at that point there are still no finished surfaces to protect. Our sanders use vacuum heads at the top of the pole, pulling most of the dust away as it comes off the wall instead of letting it drift through the house. What escapes moves toward openings and settles in ductwork, window tracks and along the front edges of stair treads.

Air returns and registers are covered before sanding begins, because dust that gets into the ductwork comes back out through it for months. Where a room cannot take airborne dust at all, we wet-sand the joints with a sponge instead, which takes longer but keeps the dust out of the air. None of this is for our own comfort on site; it is done for the trade that follows us.

The Condition the Painter Inherits

A painter judges our work by what a roller and a light will reveal, so that is the standard we use when we hand the house over. Joints sit flat, screw heads are covered, corners run straight and cut edges around openings are clean. Texture stays consistent across each room and from one room to the next, because correcting it after primer and paint go on is harder than getting it right the first time.

Floors are swept, scrap is gone and walkways are clear, so the paint crew can set up instead of cleaning up. We hand you a punch list of anything still outstanding rather than leaving it to be discovered later, because a paint crew that stops to fix drywall costs you both the day they lose and the day we need to return. Paint-ready means the house is handed over in that condition.