Robert in High River, Alberta sent us a great idea for those ceiling butt joints that are so hard to hide.
Rather than having the butt ends of his drywall meet on a ceiling joist as is standard, Robert has them meet floating in the air right in-between two ceiling joists. Then he puts a plywood splice in behind them. The secret is to put about 1/8th of an inch of spacer on the outside edges of that plywood splice. When the ends of the drywall are screwed down to the plywood, they will bend in, creating a valley for the tape and compound. The end result is a perfectly smooth ceiling with no joints showing.
It is a lot of extra work at the drywalling stage, but much less work at the taping stage -- and impeccable results. I like this one Robert. This is one case where a hard working DIY'er may just come out with better results that a pro. In fact it is because of this butt joint that I always recommend that DIYer's always put drywall on the wall vertically -- to avoid butt joints. With this trick, you don't have to be a master plasterer capable of spreading a butt joint out three feet on each side to hide it -- you can make your own valleys.
Since this text entry, I have made a whole video on this process: in the Learning Curve Tab