- [Jeff] So here's the kitchen, where we're going to
be doing the work here. This is where an electrical
panel used to be here. We've taken the wires
out of this outlet here, and you can see where a
line has been started. That's gonna be the right
side of the doorway opening, and it's gonna come
all the way up to here. Somewhere up a little higher there, we have a little pencil mark there, and then we're gonna go over here, and then come back down on this side, where you can see there's
a pencil mark there. We're going to be demoing all of this, and we've already determined this is not a load bearing wall, because there are no joists that end and rest right on top of this. There are some that go straight across, all the way to the front of the house, but that load is being beared by the exterior cement walls
on the front of the house. If you turn around here and
this is the other cement wall. You can barely see up there, there's one of the fore-joists there. These are from the roof trusses, so we're not worried about that, we do not have a load bearing wall. What we're essentially gonna build here, is our jack-stud, and
king-stud on the other side, and then a header across the top. Here we are on the other side of the wall, here in the living room, and you can see we have
the outline marked here for where the kitchen
entrance is going to be. We've already started a little
bit of sawing through here. We're probably gonna use an angle grinder to cut through this, this is plaster, and it's about an inch thick. So let's get busy. (whirring and grinding) (banging) - Give it a kick. - [Builder] That's one hell of a mess. - [Jeff] That's quick. (whirring and sawing) - [Builder] An eighth of an inch. - [Jeff] Here's the completed
doorway opening now, and we're just playing around with some of the pieces of wood. We're kinda playing around here, dry fitting a king-stud right here, which runs to the top,
goes all the way down, and you have a jack-stud
that's gonna go right here. We're gonna have to
cut this jack-stud down to meet the top level of this, 'cause a beam will go
across here, a header beam. We can use a two by four,
or we can use a two by six. It's not load bearing, but
usually if it's load bearing, I prefer to rotate a
couple of two by sixes, so that it'll be six inches tall, but stacked two boards thick, to give you really good strength, but this is not a load bearing wall, so we don't have to worry about that. We're hoping to be able to
reuse these two cripples here. Now as we step back a little bit, and check out the whole wall here, I wanted to point out something very important to remember is that, if we were gonna do a
load bearing wall here, we would have had to put up braces, to hold the ceiling up
there, and everything, before we even thought
about cutting out this hole. (hammering) - (Builder) Pretty good. (whirring) - [Jeff] Okay, so let's
recap here what we've done. We're looking at the
finished product here, and if you remember we
started off this morning, with just a full dry wall, studded wall, and what we did here to
make this doorway was, we took where these two
studs are right here, and these use to go all
the way down to the floor. So we removed these two studs, leaving just these two cripples up here. We took those two studs
and put 'em right here, on either side of our framed opening, and those became our jack-studs. We cut them down, and we make them the height of our door. Remember, this is just
going to be an opening, there's not going to
be a hanging door here, but even so, just to be standard here, we did go ahead and mount
this king-stud here. We recovered this wood from another room, and we did this king-stud
on this other side here too. It's always good practice just to do a king-stud and a jack-stud,
and the reason is, what if somebody later on wants
to come in and add a door? Well you wanna have this capability here, by having this king-stud, which
adds a lot more stability, and you can even add a few
brace pieces too, if you want. We added a couple over here on this side. There's one here, and we've got another one right over here too. Then what we do is, after we
have the jack-studs in place, you put your two header pieces here, and it just doesn't have
to be anything fancy, because this is not a loaded wall. As we look at the upper section of this door here and all the support, normally I like to use a
two by six as the header. Especially if you're doing a load. We will take two, two by sixes
and sandwich them together, and stick them vertically,
going up like that. That's how we normally do it, and it gives a lot more strength there. The way all of this works then, is if this was a load bearing wall, the load would come down the two cripples, and would go across these headers, and down the jack-stud here, all the way down to the floor. So either way there is going
to be some downward force here, from all the dry wall and everything here. We didn't make any
changes to the top plate, or the upper crown plate there. That upper crown plate
serves a couple of purposes, 'cause if you look over in the corner here you can see they used
the upper plate there, to overlap over the
adjacent wall next to it. So if I pan out just a little bit, to show you the adjacent wall. See how they kinda go over each other, almost like a brick pattern. I don't know why the builder didn't carry this upper crown plate all
the way into the corner there, but that's the way it is. We just want you to
make sure you know that, if this had been a load bearing wall, you would have had to set up another second temporary studded wall
going all the way across here, kind of to brace the
ceiling and everything. So that when you remove weight here, you're not just letting
everything sag down. You always wanna make sure too, that both your corners are square. Because if you're ever
hanging a door in there, it's gotta be absolutely,
perfectly square. Here's how we make sure that
we're completely vertical. We put our six foot level up to it, and as you can see we're pretty much right smack dab in the middle there. Then you also wanna make sure that your crossbeams here, your headers, are completely perpendicular
to your side pieces, and we do that with a carpenter's square. You can see if I put this up here, it's not wiggling, it's not moving, it's absolutely perfectly,
perfectly perpendicular. So we spend a lot of time making sure that this is the case here. Sometimes you have to put
in these little braces, like you see here if you have
wood that's slightly warped and you wanna push it in a little bit. The idea is to make sure that when you put your six foot level over here, that you don't see any cracks going down, and it stays nice and perfectly flat, against your wood all the way down. Here you're looking at my
30 degree Paslode nails. These are three and a quarter inches long, and you need to check with your building department at your municipality, 'cause if you're going to get inspected, they might be telling you how big they want the nails to be, and normally they wanna see three to three and a quarter inch nails used. So I stick these in my gun
and we just fire them in. You know, boof, boof, we just go down the wall there with those. You wanna make sure you're using approved fasteners for your area. And so that's it, that's our perfect door. That's how you put a doorway into a non load bearing wall, and at the sake of sounding repetitive, I just wanna give you a warning that, if your wall is a load bearing wall, you need to make sure that you're putting up bracing along
that ceiling there, before you even start
cutting into the old wall. Here's the view from the living room side.
