Carpentry 101: Basics of Wood Framing with MattBangsWood [#1]

what's going on guys welcome back to the channel my name is matt pinella with matt bangs wood and today we're going to go over the basics of wall framing we're going to touch base on everything from bottom plate to top plate everything in between you guys will know the names for all these pieces that go into a wall not only that you'll know what they do and why they're there if you're new here hit that subscribe button down below let's make it happen [Music] so i want to make something clear before we get this video started everything we're about to talk about has five to ten different names throughout the building industry it changes wherever you're at so please don't blow me up in the comments saying that what i called it is incorrect because there is a ton of different names whatever your boss calls it or whatever you decide you want to call it that's what it is so we're going to start down here at the bottom the very very lowest piece of a wall is called a bottom plate or a mud sill the purpose of this plate is to anchor the wall down as you can see we have small bolts like this that are embedded into the concrete they look something like that right up there we drill a hole through our mud cell when we're plating for where that anchor bolt goes and then we tighten down that anchor bolt and it fastens this wall to the concrete now since this plate is touch and concrete you can see that it's directly on concrete it has to be a treated piece of lumber the mud cell is a borate treated piece of material also known as pressure treated the reason it's known as pressure treated is the process that it actually takes to treat the lumber it goes into a chamber and pressure and vacuums do their thing to pull all the chemicals through the material our material here is treated all the way through you might also be able to tell that it's pressure treated by the little slits all the way down the material this is done to where the chemicals can seep down into the material when they're pressurizing it now a few things about the bottom plate the chemicals that it's treated with don't allow it to absorb water if you guys didn't know concrete is porous therefore it absorbs water you don't want this plate to because it'll just let water go right up this wall now they say i'm not sure how true this is that the chemicals in pressure treated cause the digestive tract of any insects to basically starve themselves therefore they don't want to eat this stuff and i haven't seen all that much pressure treated that's been chewed through but i have seen it so i don't know how true that last statement was now the bottom plate here is also fastened to the studs here when we frame our walls we have the bottom plate laid out we have the top plate laid out we pin through the bottom plate into the studs with three and a quarter nails sixteenths and that's what holds these studs down to the bottom plate we're going to jump up the top plates real quick and discuss those we have two top plates it's double plate we have one plate and we got two plates we're going to keep it simple here i don't have any fancy name for them the purpose of these plates is to tie walls together and a few other reasons that we'll get into in a second this wall running this way runs five and a half over on that double top plate and that allows it to tie into this wall here if for some reason you didn't have your plates overlapping each other what you would have to do is run what they call an ltp4 it's a little plate to plate connector running over like this is the best possible way to do it although i have seen guys that run all their exteriors and then their interiors just butt into it instead of overlapping that exterior wall million different ways to do things we're just talking about why and where today so the first top plate the very first top plate up there that plate is going to be used the same way as the bottom plate you're going to nail through the first top plate into the studs after the wall is complete you're going to go ahead and put that second plate up there that second plate is done for a few reasons as mentioned it's to tie those walls together and the second reason is for load bearing purposes so when we pull our layout some of the trusses will land on top of studs that's perfectly fine that's great but others like this one here doesn't the reason you have those double plates up there is to prevent the top plate from sagging if you only had a single plate although it's only a 16 inch span that truss and the weight of that roof could push down through that fairly easy so you have that double plate that beefed up plate all the way through for load-bearing purposes to carry the roof now there are advanced framing techniques where you stack everything but that's not seen too often here in california and since the top plate isn't touching concrete like the bottom plate it doesn't need to be bori treated it can be regular old dug for like we used for framing the only plate that has to be treated is anything that goes up against concrete and when it comes to framing when you do your material take off you're going to want to order longer plates your goal is to get the least amount of brakes as possible you don't want 20 brakes throughout a 50-foot wall so we'll order 16 foot or 20 foot plate for bottom and top so now that we've discussed our top plates and our bottom plates let's run through everything in between so whether you're in construction or not 99 of people understand the term stud this is a stud right here it runs top to bottom full length no breaks in it at all now the purpose of a stud is to construct a wall 16 or 24 inches on center is standard pulling from the edge laying out all your studs now these studs are all laid out 16 inches on center meaning if you hook this stud right here to the next one it works out to 16 inches the reason you do that is because 4 studs works out to 48 inches so on the exterior here our plywood or our osb lands and breaks on studs that's a totally different topic though the studs are used to carry the weight from above and push it all the way down to the bottom plate they come in many different sizes two by four two by six two by eight now studs come pre-cut from the lumber yard depending on the size of the wall you've got eight foot wall you're going to have 92 and a quarter as your pre-cut stud 9-foot wall you're going to have 104 and a quarter 10-foot wall 116 and a quarter and so on so forth depending on how big you get you might have to custom cut them we custom cut everything for the great room in this build so we talked about a regular stud now let's talk about a stud with a little bit more value right here we have what we call a king stud now a king stud goes on both sides of a window or a door opening and the job of a king stud is to support everything going on in between it whether you have a window or a door as you can see you have quite a bit going on top and bottom of this window here so those king studs help support all that when we go through and lay out a house start to finish all the way around we go through and lay out all of our rough openings first so our doors our windows typically they give you a center mark and then you go off both sides of that you want to lay out your king studs first once your king studs are laid out you go through and lay out your typical 16 inch on center studs your king studs and all your rough openings take priority over any of the studs in this building so you want to go through and lay those out first so now that we've talked about the king studs you know that they go on both sides of the window and support what's in between let's talk about what's in between so we're going to go ahead and work our way from the top down and since i can't reach up there i'm going to use this trusty arrow from over here to point to everything for you guys so underneath our double plate we have what we call top cripples and as i'm stressing to you guys so much the weight of the roof coming down onto these walls is very important those top cripples right there are laid out 16 on center just like a typical stud except for they don't run all the way through they break on what we call the header we used a lot of 6x6 headers in this house but your structural engineer will call those out for you now the goal of that header right there is to take the weight from the roof above as seen with the arrows and push it out evenly disperse it down the sides onto what we call the trimmers if you didn't have a beefy header like that and you only had say a two by six it would eventually cause a dip in the roof and a dip in the window and you don't want that now the trimmer's job is to support the header as i keep stressing to you guys everything from the roof carries down to the bottom plate so you have the weight of the roof being pushed down through the top cripples onto that header and then the header takes it on over to the trimmer and down the trimmer now the only job of that trimmer is to carry the load of the header above the trimmer comes down and lands on what we call the window sill this is where the window is going to be placed now as you can see here we do have two sills i get asked this quite a bit but single still just having one window sell all the way across was used a lot back in 70s 80s 90s and we still see it every now and then today the purpose of having a double still is very simple when you go to nail on any exterior trim that you've got you want to have enough room to get some good nails into that trim considering you've got the flange that comes down a good bit too by having three inches that gives you enough beef to be able to get solid nails in and even though this house isn't getting exterior trim it's common practice and it's just what we do so now the double sills here is a pretty common practice you'll see it across all residential so underneath this sill here that carries the window you're going to have the same thing you have up top top cripples down below we call these bottom cripples and they do the same exact thing as the top cripples they fill in the void they mimic 16 layout all the way through and active studs except for they don't run full height they break underneath that sill now the job of the bottom cripples is the same as the top cripples it takes the weight through the trimmers down through the sill and then all the way to the plate and disperses the weight if any from the sill down to the plate as well not only that but when drywall comes in they need to have a good spot to break if they land underneath this window sill it gives them something to screw as they can't just have a three foot void underneath this window say you have a 36 inch window that's going in you're going to frame that at 39 inches your header will cut at 39 your stills will cut at 39 and the reason for doing that is because you have your trimmers that support the header so you'll have inch and a half on both sides so if you take a 36 inch window and frame it at 39 by the time you put in your inch and a half trimmer on this side and over here to support the header above you're going to end up with a 36 inch opening again so now that we've gone over top plates bottom plates studs king studs trimmers top cripples bottom cripples stills there's not much else we need to talk about now we're going to go over a couple more things before closing out this video i want to talk about blocking it's something we get asked about quite a bit you'll see people do it differently depending on who the framer is now let's talk about why it's there before we go in depth blocking isn't necessarily needed it's kind of like an extra the purpose of blocking is to create a nice solid wall the majority of the times when we get our lumber it is wet when we frame with it after a while you'll start to hear it creak and crack it's drying out your studs will take big bows they'll twist up like crazy and what blocking does down the center here i'll explain our heights in a second it keeps all your studs fairly straight as you can see we have a small gap in between this one here it opened up a bit had those blocks not been in there it'd probably be a lot worse so the blocks do a few things they keep the studs nice and straight they also help with keeping the wall nice and rigid as well i've been asked a lot whether our blocks get in the way or not and the short answer is no our blocking is set at three foot six and down and four foot six and up the reason for this is simple i can get behind here and nail i can get behind here and nail and then come up here and nail here if you do a four foot block line you have to toenail each one of them try and get behind there and shoot as accurately as possible it's a pain and then not only that you have to deal with a block line that looks like that ninety percent of the time it's just preference though guys so now you can see here that this box is set this is three six and down that's four six and up somewhere right in here is four foot center so how'd you ran that four foot block line all the way through you might actually not make it they might have to cut your block out so three six four six works every time we've never had a complaint now the next thing i want to talk to you guys about is drywall backing this is an important one because a lot of framers forget it when they're framing when you build a house you have to put drywall up on the inside therefore when you frame a house you have to think about drywall going up as you're framing so the way we do things we'll knock out all of our wall framing first we'll come back and then worry about our drywall backing prior to the roof going on you guys have seen this done in many videos of mine it's something we do every single time now what do i mean by that when you frame a wall you have your bottom plate drywall will obviously screw in there you have your top plate they can screw in there they need perimeter nailing or screws similar to roof sheathing so down the corner and down that corner over there you have to make sure that you have a stud in place i'll show you what i mean now say we have a sheet running across this way this stud does not land on 16 center but it's in place to where you have drywall backing so the sheet of drywall run over and they have a nice solid inch and a half to screw into all the way down this sheet will come over this way they have this to screw into here now every corner on a house that you build needs to look just like that you need to have a stud coming out both ways to give them backing to screw into this way and that way so when you go to do all your wall framing you want to make sure that wherever you have an intersecting wall at you have a stud on this side and on this side back here for drywall backing now in order to achieve this and get drywall backing as easy as possible we build what we call a channel now a channel has three pieces of material you guys have seen them built in my videos if by chance you haven't watched a single thing that i've ever put out please consider clicking the i card i have tons of different house builds documented on here a lot of fun back to what we were talking about though a channel is three pieces of material you'll have a two by six flat two by six flat and then a two by six in between and by building that and putting it in place right here it allows us to have backing here and on the other side and solid backing for this wall to nail into now it doesn't stop there if you guys can remember to back out the corners of your room you can remember to back out your ceiling as well now there's multiple different ways to achieve backing for your ceiling the first method and the worst method is nailing a 2x6 flat on top of the wall now the reason i don't like this method is very simple if you stuck a 2x6 flat on that wall up there and say the concrete had a quarter inch dip here at the bottom if you plane from the trusses over into that backing that you just installed flat what's going to happen is it's going to come across and then take that quarter inch dive where the dip in the concrete is so now i'm going to show you the best possible method for installing backing check it out so in order to get this back in here it's very simple now you can see how we have it set up here we have a two by four on both sides of the intersecting wall and blocking that runs from truss to truss keeping these two by four for backing and plane now you don't have to have backing along this plate here where the truss lands on the wall you only need to have backing where you have an intersecting wall and trusses run parallel to it and the job of that backing is only for edge screws in your drywall we've gone over the basics we know what a stud is a bottom plate a top plate cripples top and bottom header sill trimmers you understand how a wall goes together another thing i wanted to note real quick is that depending on the size of the opening especially out here in california we're known for being over engineered the opening size depicts what you have for a header so while this little 36 inch window behind me may only have a 6x6 header if we walk on into the great room i'll show you when it's a little bit bigger so we can see behind me here that we have a fairly large header and the reason for that is simple we're not dealing with a small opening here we have a 16 foot set of sliders going in here therefore we need this big old beefy header above me you need something much bigger carrying the weight of that roof above so when you're dealing with that big of an opening a 6x6 will sag you figure all the way to that roof from above pushing down on it it's not going to end well so we have a five and a half by 15 psl running across there so since the 6x6 is not adequate enough the engineer does the job of making sure that all of them have a proper header and since we're dealing with such a big opening inch and a half or just a regular old 2x6 trimmer isn't going to cut it so the bigger the opening the bigger the material you're going to be dealing with monster headers and since you have a very large header up there you need something pretty big underneath it to carry that load since that is the job of the trimmer so as we come over here you can see that we have a 6x6 for the trimmer here and the job of that trimmer is to hold up the header above now as a framer you don't have any responsibility on determining what is big enough where we simply build the structure structural engineers go to college for this type of thing they learn the load ratings of everything in a building and they can determine what is safe to use where with that being said please do not ever take one of my videos and try and swap in some monstrous beam into your house thinking that you can do whatever and anything you want that's a wrap guys i hope you were able to take something away from this video whether it be something as simple as bottom plates are treated or top plates are used for load-bearing purposes if you guys enjoy this type of video and want to know more about rough framing what goes into it and how it works please leave a comment down below and let me know i appreciate all your guys's feedback and while times are tough right now and i know coronavirus is taking a lot of people out of work i hope that all you guys are safe at home and that everything has been going good if you enjoyed this video big thumbs up subscribe button down below i'll catch you guys next time bang on

Channel: MattBangsWood

Views: 1,517,206

Keywords: construction, building, how to frame, how to build a wall, building a house, framing a house, wood framing, new construction, wood house, carpenter, american carpenter, contractor, structural engineer, wall framing basics, how to frame a shed, how to carpentry, carpentry basics, carpenter tips, wood framing tips and tricks, what is a header, what is a king stud, king stud in framing, header in framing, components of a wall, how to frame a house, how to frame a wall

Id: y8W7KbJTg7A

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020