The great thing about drywall is that when it goes up, it very quickly looks like you are making progress. All of the cluttered stuff that goes on behind the wall is quickly covered over and it makes you think that with just a few dabs of drywall compound, you will be ready to paint and then kick back with a few beers in celebration of the finished product. Well, it's really not that easy. Once again I have new respect for drywallers as putting up the mud is not as easy as it looks on TV. And in this case, I have lots of inside corners from all the bulkheads that I had to put in and the fact that I am pretty slow with the mudding and it adds up to a long time to apply the first coat. I used a corner tool for the inside corners and that has helped a lot. I am hoping that if the first coat doesn't have too many surface bumps and imperfections, that the next coats will go faster and there will be less sanding as a whole. I bought the tool for sanding that you attach to the shop vac, but I have yet to use it. All I know is that the dust from just scraping down the high points was enough. I will be taping off the stairs down to the basement with plastic sheeting and I have the window open with a fan to draw out the air which seems to be doing an OK job of moving the air through the space. I have some more to do around the window and the whole (!) bathroom so I will be at it for a couple more days. I finally brought the radio down so I would have some tunes to help the time go by. I don't know what I was thinking for the past few months; I didn't want to bring it down there since I was worried about dust etc. gumming the thing up. When I do the sanding I will just keep it upstairs (behind the plastic sheeting, and turn up the volume!