How To Build A Deck | #2 Framing [Beam/Joists/Ledger]

hi I'm Shannon and I'm back from host improvements comm today I'm going to show you part two of our how to build a deck series and part two is going to deal with the framing of the deck so that's the ledger board on the house the joists the beam that holds the deck up and the posts as well so before we get started I just want to talk a little bit about the bits and pieces that we're gonna show here initially so we're gonna start out by putting the ledger on the house and you can see over here we've already done half of it so we've got a pressure-treated 2 by 10 piece of lumber here bolted through to the sill plate of the house and we've also got a piece of flashing right here that's tucked up underneath the siding that you can see we have cut out we've got a little bit left to cut here yet but we cut the existing siding out so that we can put the ledger rate against the sill plate of the house so what I what I used for the flashing is just a simple piece of vinyl window and door cap so the reason I used vinyl is because we're it's going to be up against the pressure treated decking and you've got to be careful what metals you put against pressure-treated decking so in most cases they recommend copper for this and the price of copper is quite expensive so they they recommend basically copper or stainless steel or a vinyl product so that's why I use this it's the least expensive of the options and still does a good job and the basic reason for this is so that any moisture that comes down the wall here would now the deck boards will be on top of here yet but the moisture would come down and it can't run back in between the ledger board and the rim joist and rot either one of them out so it basically just deflects the water out onto the deck so under the deck so it can get away from the wall system so okay so and then for the bolts depending again on what size of deck you're doing space or the length of your joists and that sort of thing will determine a little bit on the size of bolts or the spacing of the bolts as well that fastened that ledger to the wall we're using these coated deck bolts ledger bolts that are made to deal with a CQ type or sorry the pressure treated decking so it's basically an AC Q compatible fastener is what it is but you could use hot dipped galvanized leg bolts you could use hot dipped galvanized through bolts any anything like that one thing you want to remember is make sure your bolt has some kind of washer or at least a pretty good sized head so that it can't you know pull rate through the ledger board itself so these these guys they don't recommend a washer they they say this is wide enough and so we didn't use a washer at all they also didn't say that you had to pre-drill in fact it said no pre drilling required if you're using a bigger bolt a lot of times I'll use hot dipped galvanized half inch lag bolts so with those I would drill a half inch hole through the ledger board and then just about a five sixteenths pilot hole into the rim joist you know just to because of the size of that bolt but these guys say you don't need it so we didn't do it so that's the basics there also when you anytime you're cutting pressure-treated lumber you want to treat the cut with a preservative whether it's clear or green or whatever you want should go on any exposed wood after you've cut it so we did have to cut this one end to get the length that we want it on the second piece so so that's already been treated so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to cut this the rest of this siding off just to kind of show you we've done most of it I've done the other end I'm gonna do one vertical cut here just so you get the idea of working with this because we're cutting where the lap of the siding is so you know it doesn't as you can see here it won't always cut right through but I just want to kind of show you that so you're not cutting way into the rim joist of the house or something also it's not a bad idea just have a look make sure there's not going to be hopefully any electrical or you know plumbing or anything like that not only on the inside of the house up in those spaces so these bolts don't go through and puncture something but also out here so you're not hopefully having to cut through it or anything like that as far as the length of your leg bolts while I'm just thinking of it basically what you want to be is at least a half inch longer than the two boards that you're going through so in our case we've got an inch and a half ledger board and an inch and a half rim joist on the house so we've got a total of three inches so you'd want a minimum up three and a half inch ledger bolts to go through there so it actually does protrude through a little bit these ones are actually three and five-eighths the box says so okay so we've got that so I'm going to put on my safety glasses and ear protection and I'll finish this cut I'm going to do one one cut like I said just randomly vertically just see you see how to do that I've already done it on the two ends where we actually needed it but I'll do it here so that you can see and I think we're probably gonna have to reset the cameras to a different angle for this [Music] okay so I've got I just finished that cutoff now we need to remove this piece of siding as well as this one here and generally speaking generally speaking with this type of siding you should be able just to pry it loose and dispose of it so you'll find you know once I get this lip off this piece is going to be nailed on generally it will just pull out like so like that and you can kind of see again where I did this test cut just as an example or didn't quite cut through but because we're cut through across the top it's not really an issue you could finish that off if you had to with a small saw or recipient an ice with this particular siding so up in this corner right here you can see because you know I'm trying not to cut past what's visible when I was doing the cut there's a little bit of that siding left so just carefully score it with the knife without trying to cut the paper or host wrap or whatever you have behind yours now this would be the same idea if you had vinyl siding obviously you aren't gonna cut it with the skill saw like that though you're likely gonna cut it with a knife or snips possibly but you do want to remove it with stucco with stucco you probably could leave it on there and just go over it but I still would recommend you remove it and that's a little more work so there's a couple nails left in here I'm just gonna pull them out that's what was holding the siding siding roll on I'm gonna leave that in this case tar paper on there yours might be host rap I'm gonna leave that on there but there is a starter strip down here that the siding was sitting into so i'm gonna pry that off I'll need to cut this end I'm gonna pry that off to get it out of the way and then we're just about ready to start putting the ledger in place trying to hold it up there so you can kind of see what I'm doing basically it's just held on with a few single nails and this metal one like this basically will break right through the heads of the nails the heads stay there that's fine we'll just pound them tight flushed so I'll just finish removing this and then we'll come back okay so we've got this all ready here to put in the flashing and put the ledger board on I've gone and pre marked the ledger board so what I've done here is at the ends and the joints of the ledger board I put two bolts as you can see here I think you can see them and then they're spaced about every 18 inches after that about two inches down from the top if if possible you can stagger them in this case our ledger board is gonna hang down where the concrete is so I just decided to keep my regular ones all just spaced along the top they're evenly at 18 inches again that will vary a little bit depending on you know the load on your deck and the specs so you'll have to kind of work that out by asking somebody who can help you with that I guess every situation is a little different but these guys actually recommended two feet for this deck on the box for these anchors they had a bit of a chart I went 18 inches just to be sure that we had a little extra there so something else maybe I didn't mention is how we determine the height of this ledger board so basically what I did is because we've got a door here most people will have some kind of door coming out of the home onto the deck we wanted to be sure that when we put the deck boards on which are inch and a half thick that it was gonna fit down below you know the threshold or any-any trim on the door the door isn't gonna hit it when it opens or anything like that preferably you want to be you know fairly close here I've got about an extra quarter inch in between the bottom of the threshold and my board it's not a very safe or comfortable thing if you come out of the you know come with the deck out the door and you have a three inch or four inch drop down onto the deck a lot of people are going to trip and fall you'll probably get used to it but company your children will definitely be tripping all the time so you want to try to keep it up to a comfortable height so it's just a nice step in and out of the house so so that's how we determine the height and what I did is I just cut the siding just slightly higher because and this is when the deck boards go on it it'll butt over against the siding and cover any gap you have there anyways so okay so this this flashing I talked about before we're just using vinyl window and door cap for vinyl siding this is easily cut with snips most metals that you're gonna find to put on here are gonna cut with tin snips to whatever length you need but you don't want to just but the pieces together you want to actually overlap them by about six inches okay so it just so happens that two full lengths of this doesn't quite make it all the way on the length of our deck so I'm just gonna put a little splice here a in the middle okay so the first thing I'm gonna do is get this up this piece of flashing up in underneath the siding so you may have to pry that out a bit if there's a like under the door we don't have it over here but under the door the little strip of siding that was there was nailed with a few nails to hold it in place so we just V notched this back lip here of the channel so that we could slide them up and get around those nails without removing the nails so just uh once you get it started it usually goes alright just get it up underneath there just kind of fighting with the paper a little bit there we go so basically fit just up underneath there we want to make sure that it's right out to the ends of our ledger board and then we've got this as an overlap here in the center where our joints going to be then with the ledger board with some assistance from the cameraman down at that end we're gonna hold it up there I'm gonna flush it up at this end because we already know this is good we've got it level I'm gonna just just put one nail from the pass load gun into the into this end and then I'll use a level to double check this this piece here typically I would have cut all the siding off in one shot figured out my height to the top here or the bottom snap the chalk line and just use that as a guide but because we kind of did this in two steps I'm just gonna use the level anyways so like I said he's just holding that end up everything down there looks like it'll be alright okay and I'm just lifting my end up flush to the end of the one we already installed and I should have had my glasses on I've got them right on my head so I put one in there I'm gonna grab the level just get my partner to lift that up just a little bit on that end if you can old sorry down sorry my my bad right there so we're level I'm just going to tack it here at this end I'll just double check that it's good raid out to this end looks nice and those tacks will just kind of hold that up there until such time as I can get all the bolts in okay so I'm gonna grab some bolts here and a impact driver and like I said before I marked mark the spots so you can maybe see here that I've got two marks at a joint I want to get two at the joint and then I've got to mark every 18 inches after that are the reason I picked 18 inches is because my joists are gonna be 16 inches on center that way it should work out that I never have one of these sticking out in the way work great where a joist is going to be so so I'll dry it start by driving one in and you don't have to sink them really crazy home just let it snug that board back [Applause] you can see how that pulled this joint in pretty nicely I'm just going to go all the way along I've got single ones now all the way along the top I'm going to come two and a half inches down or so and I've got pencil marks for the distance until I get to that end where I'll put another pair of them you can see it sucks it in there nice and tight [Music] something else to mention and if you've watched any of my other videos about framing before you always want to if the wood has any crown and by crown I mean when you look down this piece of wood from the end across the top of it it has a crown you want the crown to go up you don't want it to go down so always put the crown up that's what this little arrow right here was when I had a look at them when I was getting them ready I just marked which way the crown was as a reference so yeah for your joists and all that kind of stuff beams you always want the crown to go up on on the lumber you're using a lot I better mention that while I was thinking of it [Music] I'm gonna go right to the end just that's not quite tight to the wall so I'm going to put my two end ones in so I can hold it tight sometimes you'll find when you're driving something in especially when you don't have a pre-drilled as you get through the first piece and into the second to the first outside piece wants to pull away actually a little bit if you just back your bolt out and then go in again or your screw it should pull it tight again okay so we got that back taped to the wall couple more [Music] okay so as far as this molding here goes you really at this point can't fasten it or anything yet it's just gonna get pushed down here tight and when you do the deck boards one's gonna be sitting overlapped onto it anyways to kind of hold it into place but there's just you don't really want to try to avoid doing any face nails if you absolutely had to just do the odd one through the siding but you know your siding is not gonna fly off its nailed right here it's gonna be just fine so when I go to do my choice what will happen this is just a little piece but when I go to put my joists on here you can see there's some movement in that this way so my choice to go across there and kind of hold it back as well okay so I'm just looking here looks like that's all gonna be good I've got all our bolts in so I think we're good on that initial step now kind of the next step is going to be to build our beam get it set up get it set on the posts so that we can start marking here start putting our joists on and that just before we do the joists then I'll lay all the joists out as far as marking exactly where they're gonna be like I mentioned I think just a few minutes ago they're basically all going to be 16 inch on center and a lot of decking you know you can kind of look especially when you get into the CompStat deck some of them require a minimum of 16 inches a lot of them are getting so that they'll allow you to do 24 inches but it gets a little spongy on some of them so I like to use 16 inches and even sometimes for composites I'll go 12 inches on Center just to be sure we're using two by six pressure-treated 16 inches on center is is more than sufficient I mean I probably could have gone 24 inches but I kind of tend over build a little bit I'd rather be a little stronger than it needs to be instead of having an issue down the road so so we've got our ledger on and like I said the next step is that beam so we'll get it that next okay so we're getting ready to put the beam together here and in our case we've got your beam size kind of comes all down to the length of your joist coming from span or what the span of your joist is and also how many posts you have under your beam all determines what your being size needs to be in it there's so many variables I mean I can't tell you just one certain rule basically what we've got our deck the span from where it attaches to the house to where the beam is what did that work out - it was ten and a half feet okay so that's the span of our joists the beam total is 16 feet long and I'm putting three posts underneath it there they're each coming in about a foot and a half from the end one in the middle and again put half in from the end now in our case we're using a double two by eight pressure treated lumber it's all going to depend on what you're doing and your your particular situation you could have a three ply two by eight it might be two ply two by ten three ply two by ten it's all gonna kind of depend on exactly your size of the deck and the spans and everything so for our deck this is what we're doing so anyways I've got the pressure treated lumber laying here so again like said they're two by eight pressure treated they're 16 feet long I cut them my deck at that point is actually 16 feet outside outside I cut these a quarter inch under that so my beam ends are just in a little bit and not protruding out so so I cut it to length I used the wood preservative on the cut ends again which I think they're both ended up down there so they're they're treated you also like I mentioned before you want to put your crowns up so I I marked my crown you probably can't see you'll might see the arrow later on when I move down there but I've got this right now as the top on my beam right here the way it's laying so I want the crown up I'm gonna put I'm using hot dip galvanized nails these nails are three and a quarter inches long so I'm going to them slightly so they don't hopefully protrude out the backside and for this 2x8 I'm gonna use rows of four nails I'm gonna come in about four inches from the end here with my first row and then about every 16 inches after that so four nails every 16 inches I'll do it all the way down the length then I'll flip it over and do the same thing on the other side so I'm using this cordless nailer but you could be hand nailing it or whatever I wouldn't screw it you could use through bolts I wouldn't use screws they're a little too brittle so nailing is better for this so to start out with I'm gonna flush because I know this to the top I'm going to flush the two up nice and flush to each other I'm gonna slightly angle the nailer so I've got my I've got my four nails in down here and I'm just gonna move over approximately 16 inches and do my next row and I'm just gonna work my way along and as I'm doing that I'm moving the two pieces because I've got two to eight so I'm gonna move the two pieces to try to always get this flushed up you know if one's a little more crooked than the other so I'm gonna move over I know that my this nail are here is about 13 inches so I just kind of use it as a gauge you can see here possibly my arrow on there that I had to show which way that piece was crowned okay so I rolled it over and I'll just do the same thing on this side okay so we've got our our beam all nailed together and made up now what we need to talk about is how we're supporting that beam in your case in most typical cases you're probably gonna have concrete piles maybe even just those small concrete deck blocks if you're using those deck blocks and it's allowed in your area I would also add you know a sixteen or eighteen by eighteen concrete patio block underneath that deck block it just spreads that weed out and gives you a better solid surface so so like I said you're probably gonna have piles which you might have already done before you got your beam ready and everything so you need to determine how far from the house that's gonna be what the spacing is you know drill them fill them with concrete throw a couple rods of rebar in them too and smooth the top off anyways if you're doing piles that's a whole different issue and and we can't really show that to you here in this case we've got concrete pad like you know already know that we're working off of so I had the luxury of being able to snap out some lines to show the basic edges of the deck now this line isn't the edge of the deck the edge of the decks out here somewhere but this side line here is is the one edge of the deck and this chalk line that you actually see here is is my beam location so so it's kind of nice in this situation to be able to just snap it out right on the ground you may have to use string lines or whatever to get yours all figured out but anyways these adjustable brackets here in our case this deck isn't real high off the ground so we actually don't even aren't even going to need a post between the bracket and the beam so our beam is just going to be able to sit right in these brackets and they're just completely adjustable here for height manufacturer recommends keeping about three inches of threads in this sleeve and the sleeve as you can see is bolted to the concrete and we've got one more to do yet so I can kind of show you how to do that so that's fixed to the concrete to keep this base nice and solid once all the weight gets on everything holds down nicely and the the beam is then attached to this bracket as well now the one thing that's a little a little iffy is we're still not actually attached to the ground in this particular situation so if you're in a tornado area this Brad this particular bracket may not work for you because in theory that deck could still pull out here so even though where we are we got some pretty strong winds and we call it a hurricane by jokingly we definitely do not have a high risk of tornadoes here so it's not completely required to be fully inserted in the ground so anyways like I said if you had a post these there's lots of different versions of this there's some that are similar to this without this bracket that actually would embed in your concrete if you're doing piles or pouring concrete you could still use the same system and embed it right in the concrete and then insert a post and go up from there to attach to your beam so anyways we don't need to do that I'm gonna show you how to attach this next adjustable bracket right here so I marked along here our locations the X is the center of of my bracket now with these ones I can look great down the middle and see see my center location it's not that you really need to be quite that exact you know one one inch one way or the other isn't gonna make a huge difference here but I'm gonna basically put it on my mark just mark out my holes I need to drill I'll move that out of the way and then I'll just use my hammer drill here too to drill the holes and then I'm gonna use in these what do they actually call these one these wedge anchors so they basically just hammer in you might have seen me use these on one of my other videos dealing with attaching wood to concrete so I'm just gonna get the drill going here drill these holes quickly and we'll put the bolts in [Music] so I've got those grilled now I'm going to use some air to just blow that dust away so we've got the holes all blown out you might have noticed I didn't get as deep on these two I must have hit a row of rebar so I could only go down as deep as I could go still should be sufficient so I thread the nut on first just in case I damage the threads just hammer that in till it bottoms out I can see it's not a real Street so I'm just going to straighten it up there a little bit so get all these in and then we'll place the racket just pull all these washers and nuts off and you'll probably have to do some adjusting on these to get it all to line up to the walls I'm just kind of using the base of the this is a bit of a template I didn't work out as great as I wanted it to but I think these two when I hit that rebar may be moved over just a little bit let's see if we can get it tightened down if not I may have to try to drill those holes out just a little more on the bracket okay so that's sucking down there so worked out okay so we've got that on there good and solid I'll just get this kind of adjusted half closed so now we're ready to drop that beam in there it takes a little more work when there's three or four of these that it has to sit in two because getting them all lined up perfectly but we'll see what happens here okay so I I will just check this for level and I had kind of pre-adjusted it looks like I was alright so you can see it's it's level there I just have to adjust this Center one up just like so so it's up there tight and like I said I'm not gonna put the bolts in these yet until I've got the deck frame sitting on here and then that way if I have to do some final legit you know minor adjustments one way or the other I can still slide the beam but you do want to make sure you get your your bolts in there also I may have to still adjust this whole beam down we want ideally we want the deck to slightly slope at the top of the deck this way so any water drains away from the house so you know like I said this about it was a ten and a half foot span I probably want the deck to drop you know at least half an inch in that ten and a half feet so just to be sure that there is definitely some some slope away here now the concrete is already sloped in this case so any water that goes through the deck is gonna run away anyways but yours might not be that way it's maybe a good thing to mention too while I'm just thinking of it that any prep work underneath the deck that you want to do you know if you want to put crushed rock or put some landscape fabric down with rock on it or whatever you probably want to do it before you kind of get right to this stage you know do your piles and then do all your landscaping underneath make sure you got your dirt sloped away from the home do whatever landscaping you want underneath and then go ahead and frame your deck because it's gonna be a real pain afterwards okay so we've got our beam basically temporarily sitting in the position that needs to be now I just want to talk about laying out the ledger board for the joist spaces we're using 16 inches on center so to lay that out all you want to do is start at one end hook your tape right on the end does that be the outside of my first choice and then I want to just come over here's the 16 inches so this would be the center of the joist so I need to come back 3/4 inch and make my line okay so this is the actual right hand edge of the joist and you see I have an X here this is just indicating this is the side of the line the joist it's on so leave it hook there just go to every 16 inch mark on my tape they're all marked out in red right here and but make sure you come back three quarters of an inch from each one okay and just go all the way down you're all you all the way down your ledger now in our case we're we're putting a perimeter two by six around our deck and so I need a little bit extra blocking and a couple extra joists to do that so now once I've marked out all my regulars I went back and determined where I needed other joists to sit so you can see I'm gonna have one right here but then I've got another one right here and you'll see once I get to putting the decking on why that is and also on our particular deck it's a little bit of a funny shape here I've got a four by four little platform that comes off on the side here and then the rest of the deck continues out here for 12 more feet and then after this four foot protrusion there's a set of stairs goes down and it's the same way on both ends of this deck but you'll you'll see that as things come along here so so kind of the next step that I'm gonna do will have to reset the camera and I'm going to start out by putting some joists up and you'll notice I'm not cutting into length we're looking for approximately twelve foot out from the house for the main part of the deck in my particular case if it happens to be two or three inches over that you know by the time I've got the width of the ledger and everything on in our case it isn't going to matter so so I'm gonna put them all on full length your boards may not be all exactly the same when you buy them they may be slightly different but I'm going to put them up snap a line down the end if they happen to be all the same length then that's perfect I don't have to do anything but if if they're a little bit in and out one or the other then I just will trim them off at that point but you're gonna see all that so I'm going to bring the joists in I want to put the crown up every time I'm gonna put it against the wall and we want remember our flashing will push back we want the top of the joist flush with the top of this and I'm just gonna put one or two quick nails into it just to tack it into place but then we will put joist hangers on and you do need to have joist hangers on so so we'll just reset the camera and go from there okay so we just laid a few joist up here we're using pressure-treated 2 by 10 and I've marked them all out so I know which way the crown is obviously I want the crown up and I've just got these ones ready to go so like I said before we're just gonna stand them up I'm gonna get them up here where I want to and on the line that I want and I'm just going to tack them in place for right now so I'm just getting it on the line flush to the top and tacked into place [Applause] okay so I have it tacked in and the reason I tack it is just because to try to put the hanger on if you went along and just put all your hangers on some of these can be slightly different in in width so it's just better to flush put them all on tacked flush to the top here and then go back and put your hanger on there so for the hanger make sure it's compatible with pressure-treated lumber with the hanger what I want to do I'm using also the proper screws for it not just deck screws and I just pull it up tight to the bottom of the joist get one of these screws in these screws are these are inch-and-a-half these ones but you could use inch and a quarter I even and you're just wanting to put a screw in each each and every hole I'm just kind of getting both sides up here make sure it's tight up to the bottom okay now they send this driver bit here with these screws that doesn't have a magnet in it which would be a lot handier so once you got your screws all in the sides there's also a couple that go in here so just place those in like sad do it on both sides okay so that's we've got our first joist in now I'm not going to worry about this in 4:8 now as long as it's sitting up on the beam and not going to fall off and I would just keep working my way along doing the same thing for every one of them now you'll notice I'm going to have another one right away right close here and like I mentioned a few minutes ago you'll kind of see why that is a little later on but I'm just going to continue along [Music] okay so we've got the main joists all put in with the joist hangers and everything and now we're gonna deal with this outside rim joist and you may be able to see that some of these aren't 100% the same length in fact if I pull this get lucky enough to pull this string across the ends you'll be able to see it easier so you can see there's a few here they're a little shorter than the others so what we're gonna do is snap the line and cut them all off so they end up being the same length and Street so I've I've determined a measurement just from the ledger board marked it here and I'll just pull a string line across to get a straight line to the other end then I'll square that line down on every one and cut them to length [Applause] so I'll just grab a here's a square so from this line that we've got there on everyone I'll just square down like so and then I can cut them all off and they'll all end up being the same length then I'll just do a few here just to show you [Applause] okay so we've cut all our joist off we've treated the ends that we cut with the preservative I've also cut my my end joist my rim joist to length and treated the end that I cut and I also marked it out the same as what's on the wall for the positions of the joists now if you're doing this by yourself which I am right now I just nailed or screwed this scrap piece of wood on the bottom of a joist down at this end so when I flip this this down it'll hold that end up and and allow me to kind of work by myself so so we're gonna start at this end and remember my joists aren't attached to the beam yet so you got to be careful not to jostle it around too much so I'll just flip this down get it somewhat close using the hot dip galvanized nails get this flush down here come on okay so now it'll kind of hang there on its own okay so I've got one nail in there to hold it up I'm gonna be nailing this with four nails in the end of each one we don't need joist hangers on the inside afterwards because the joists are supported by that beam they're not being supported by this attached to anything so the nails are going to be more than sufficient if if this was going to be exposed I would myself I would mark an actual spot for each nail or screw that you're using just to make it look good in my case when this deck is all done this is going to be covered up again anyway so I'm not too worried if they don't look 100% pretty so I'll just finish nailing this first one and then you can probably see here there's a slight the joist is higher than the rim joist on most of these so once I nail this first one on I'm gonna just stick a shim under here on the beam just to lift this up so that I can play with those ones a little bit just remember to take that shim out after it'll just allow me to get those flush easier sorry I think I think I said I was gonna put four nails but I was wrong I'm it's two by ten so I'm gonna use five also I was thinking this a little while ago two by eights would have been sufficient for the joist and this size of deck I went with two by tens because of the fact that we're using wooden 4x4 posts for the railing and the 2 by 10 just gives it a little bit more structure to make those posts a little stronger so so the 2 by tens some of you might be saying oh that's overkill it is really for the deck but for the railing I'm using 2 by 10 to help that out a little bit okay so I've raised that up oh shoot huh this should have been facing the other way I've got to knock that off and turn it up because I have now I've got the crown down too much talking not enough thinking here so I need this to be this direction that's going back on our support there I'll get this all flushed up again that'll be better okay so mmm so now I can just line my joists all up with the lines that I have on the inside which is the proper side this time and get it flush on the top here with the joist actually I want to leave that one out for now and I'll show you why in a few minutes I'm just gonna skip that one so I'm just going to go all the way along and do all of these [Applause] okay so we finished nailing the end rim joist on we've cut some blocking to go in between here and basically basically if you've got more than eight feet between your supports which in our case is the house and the beam you should put a row of blocking in about half way half way through the span so determine where that's going to be snap a chalk line from end to end and then cut the blocks the right measurement to fit because we're 16 inches on center so it should be about 14 and a half inches so I've caught a bunch I've treated the ends and then to make it easier to fasten to nail just stagger them on every second one on each side of the line so now I can end nail each one without having the other one that I just finished in the way I've just put three nails in each one of these these are just to keep it from racking and they give it a little bit of extra strength up and down as well between the span you'll notice here that I've got some short ones in here between these these narrow spots the reasoning for this is we're gonna put a border around this whole deck to start with it'll be two by six so I'll be so that's not going to be this wide but so we're gonna have a border all the way around the perimeter and then our deck boards will bud into that so because it's five and a half inches if I didn't have anything here it would just it'd be tippy so this is just so the length of the board has something to rest on just like mini joists running the other directions so so put in all the main spaced ones first and then you're usually going to have the the very last two spaces on each end are gonna be a different number so what I do is put all my regular ones in and then I know in our case our total decks supposed to be 16 feet right from outside here to outside over there so then I will measure and see what it's at to figure out what I want to cut these blocks out sometimes you end up spreading this a little bit or shrinking it if these blocks are a little off so I always leave the last couple out and cut them fit so so just go along and put those in and you just want them flush to the top these ones if any darn fan if anything you want them flush or even if if these ones are set down a bit that would be fine those those perimeter ones that I had need to be flush but okay I just realized I forgot to actually square the top of the platform so to do that we're gonna measure it diagonally and we should end up with the same two numbers I should have really done it before I added that whole row of blocking so it's gonna be a little harder to move now if it is out of square but anyways well we'll deal with that so we'll we'll measure diagonally here I've got 240 and a half and 240 and 3/4 here so it's got to go to the left basically probably an eighth of an inch so what I'll do is I'll just see if I can move it myself I'm just going to try to Rack the deck that way and then we'll check the diagonals again there I got it some so we'll see if that's enough I probably went too far that's 240 and 3/4 so we're probably too far now 240 and a half so we're exactly the opposite so I just need to pull it back a little bit this way and I could pretty much tell that now on the end of the beam so I would imagine right there it's going to be good so this is one way to check the squareness of any rectangular square surface you have 240 and ya 5/8 basically yeah 240 and 5/8 so now we're okay so what I'll do is I'll actually cap attack that into the beam we've actually got the beam bolted in a couple spots so it can't move right now so I'll just give this a bit of attack here just to keep it from moving I just need to make sure my beams straight up and down [Applause] so I'm just gonna toenail one of these joists into the beam like that that'll just keep things from moving around on us till we get it all fastened down okay so I've just got to finish cutting those blocks in that center row at each end and then we'll come back to fastening to the beam and then we're pretty much done the framing part you can see over on this side there is a four by four jut out over there and there will be over on that corner too you'll see that in the next video it'll all be framed up but I'm not going too much into detail there we're just dealing with this rectangular area for the framing part okay so I'll just measure those and get them cut and then we'll come back okay so we've got all our blocking in we've got the top of the deck squared up we took a level on against the beam pushed in and in or out whichever way it had to be and just tacked it on each end and in the middle to get it running plumbing and straight so now what we need to do is fasten the beam to those adjustable brackets and the joist to the beam so for the brackets we're going to use these three eights actually I think they're 5/16 hot-dip galvanized leg bolts are three inches long so they'll penetrate both plies of the beam and we're gonna put one in each hole on those brackets so I mean there's no rocket science to this just zip it in there we've got one in there already that you we put in earlier okay just tighten it up there's two holes on each side [Applause] don't use deck screws use leg bolts okay so we'll do that on every every bracket okay I don't think you need to see me do that on each one now we're going to switch to these brackets so we're going to use a mechanical fastener to fasten the the joist I'm actually gonna put these on this side but I'll show you what it would look like on this side can i there okay so one end attaches to the beam and one end attaches up here to the joist and we're gonna use these same structural screws that we were using for the joist hangers now there's a lot of holes in here for this purpose these are actually like a hurricane clip for rafters for this purpose here I'm just gonna place two of these structural screws in each flange and that'll be enough so okay so I'm just going to go ahead and do that I want to do it on the backside here so I'm afraid you're not gonna really see all of it but you'll see this one the top part I'll just get it in here come on okay so we got two in there something else we didn't show is mark the top of the beam spaced out for the joist so we're just shifting the joist one way or the other if it needs to to hit that line okay so now that's securely down sitting on there if you remember when I fastened that end rim joist I was kind of having to lift here and there and whatever you can see here this one joist isn't sitting on the beam and that's because these the joists sometimes are a little different in height from one to the other so like that one's tight this one's tight that one's floating a bit it's not too much we can really do about that still just tie your anchor on there and get it down there as best you can so okay so I'll just finish that all up off-camera and that kind of completes this this section of the video okay so I realize this was a pretty long video and I hope you stayed right to the end here you know we basically showed you start to finish the the basic framings for a fairly basic deck and most of the scenarios we went through here will will be very similar to any deck project that you have so it should give you a good idea where to where to get going this is a whole series on building this deck so look for the next video you should be one for doing the decking one for doing the railing and some stairs too so look for those videos on our youtube channel and you can subscribe to the youtube channel as well while you're there and then you kind of get notified if we post anything new you can also also follow us on facebook twitter you can check us out as well on our website at house - improvements comm thanks a lot for watching

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 2,970,223

Rating: 4.7906051 out of 5

Keywords: Joist, Framing, how-to, diy, deck, patio, Do It Yourself (Hobby), build, construct, Design, back, yard, front, Construction, Repair, Installation, joists, beam, brackets, ground, dirt, concrete, improve, house, home, improvement, outside, pergola, pressure, treated, adjust, piles, 2x10, 2x8, ACQ, hot, dipped, galvanized, hangers, ledger, blocking, floor, frame, Home Improvement (Interest), exterior

Id: 82D-KPAX-iM

Length: 58min 8sec (3488 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2015