Kyle and I spent ten hours today, our longest work session to date, completing the installation of strapping on the ceiling in his basement. Normally, this is a simple matter of cutting the 1×3 straps to length and nailing them perpendicular to the floor joists at each intersection, and then repeating the pattern every 16 inches. We used my cordless nailer to drive the roughly 700 nails required for the 350 or so intersections. In our case, however, we had to shim over 100 of them to compensate for the large variations in joist size/position. This was by far the most labor-intensive and time-consuming part of the job but should result in a nice and flat ceiling.