How to Frame a Basement YOURSELF | Complete Guide

so for those of you that don't know or are new to the channel I'm currently finishing out my unfinished basement into a short-term rental for Airbnb I'm going to be going over all of the different things you need to do in order to finish a space like this but in today's video I'm going to be going over the framing so if you're curious about that and and what you need to do for a basement in particular I'll be walking you through that and kind of what I had to do so stick around and let's get into the video [Music] before we get too far into the video let's talk about the different framing members that we're going to use working our way up would start with the bottom plate this is going to be made out of a pressure treated material since this is going directly onto concrete and it's what we're going to use to Anchor the wall to the ground next we have the studs and these run vertically and these make up the structure of the wall and it's what we attach our drywall to and everything else if it's a load-bearing wall these are what transfers the load from floor to ceiling then we have the top plate which is what we use to attach the wall to the ceiling and it also provides more structural stability a double top plate provides a little bit more weight bearing but it's primarily used to lock together two different walls and even though this is not a load-bearing wall I still had to use a double top plate because otherwise my walls would not reach the floor joists above next we have a rough opening and this one happens to be for a door when framing out a rough opening for a door here are the framing members that you're going to run into first we have the king studs and these run floor to ceiling just like a normal stud but these are what everything attaches to next are the Jack studs and these have a few different purposes first is they are the support for the header so that nothing comes crashing down and second is they establish the rough opening width next we have the header building code stipulates that you have a stud every 16 inches and a header is the only way to get around that so if you want a door or a window a header is going to allow you to support the weight above so that you can put in that window or door these work by spanning that Gap across the door or window and that load gets transferred directly down through the Jack studs into the ground next we have the cripples now in the past headers used to be directly above the door and the cripples would be on top of it transferring the load up to the top plate but nowadays those headers are actually framed at the top of the wall and the cripples are used more as spacers now with the rough opening you want it to be two inches wider than the door that you're going to be installing so if you're installing a 32 inch door you're going to want a 34 inch rough opening and the same thing goes for the height you want it to be about two inches taller than the door you'll be installing when framing a wall the first thing to do is lay out where your studs are going to go so we're going to go down the tape and Mark every 16 inches but we're actually going to come back three quarters of an inch and put a mark there that's because the stud is actually an inch and a half wide so when we place the stud right on that Mark the center is going to be dead on every 16 inches traditionally you do this marking on the bottom plate but since it's pressure treated it's a little bit harder to see so for the purposes of this video I did this on the top plate next we're going to come back with the speed square and transfer that Mark all the way across the board to make it a lot more visible and then we're going to draw an x on the side that we're going to be placing the 2x4 now that we know that let's go ahead and frame a wall the first thing I do is cut my bottom plate because that's going to be the exact width of the wall that I'm going to be building then I'm going to cut a top plate to the exact same length as the bottom plate now that I have both my bottom and top plates cut I can lay out where my studs are going to go next I'm going to separate the bottom and top plate so that I can place my studs in between they don't need to be perfectly lined up but you want them in the general area so that you nail them properly so moving on we're going to use a three inch framing nailer to sink two nails through that top and through the bottom plate into those studs now in previous videos I've had people saying you need three Nails actually you don't in a 2x4 wall each stud gets two nails and a two by six wall each stud gets three nails now there are a couple different ways to frame walls in the basement the first is to frame it on the ground and then stand it up the second is to frame it in place now both of these are just fine ways to frame a wall but they work better in different scenarios if you have a big open area to frame walls like I do in this room then I would recommend building them on the floor as it's way faster but I will say that building a wall on the floor and standing it up can be a total pain in the butt given how tall it is when you add that double top plate so to counteract that I'm building it without the double top plate and I'm adding that in later you will need a way to fasten your walls to the concrete and there's a few different ways to do that I'm using a ram set which is a 22 caliber blank to fire a nail directly through that bottom plate and into the concrete you can also use a hammer drill and tapcons or you can get some masonry nails but those take quite a bit more elbow grease so if you're using a ram set all you have to do is shoot it through the bottom plate so now I handle the issue of the double top plate and you can see here just how tight it can be and this is really one of the downsides of building your walls on the ground because you don't know this until it's already built so for that reason alone I recommend building your walls in place when framing a basement and definitely don't follow my lead here standing on top of a paint bucket it was super precarious and just a bad idea I fell off multiple times I actually ended up getting some scaffolding from Harbor Freight for about two hundred dollars and that's going to help me out not just with the framing but also with the drywall and everything else that I'm going to be doing so now with the bottom nailed to the concrete we need to secure the top to hold the wall strictly in place and I do that by nailing the double top plate up into the floor joists above so now let's run over the basic construction of a header up until now I've actually been framing non-load bearing walls so I didn't need a single header but now I'm going to be dealing with load bearing walls so I'm going to have to build some headers for a window and a few other doors that I'm going to be putting in now what I'm doing here is building a header for a 2x6 wall so what we're going to need for this are three two by tens and two sheets of half inch plywood traditionally what you would use here is half inch OSB but I didn't have any on hand and it made no sense to go and buy some since I already had some quarter inch plywood so instead I used four layers of quarter inch instead of two layers of half inch but in essence what we're doing here is we're cutting our material into pieces that are slightly smaller in all directions than the actual two by tens we do that because this is really just to be used as a spacer it doesn't provide anything structurally to the header so now that we have all of our pieces cut we're going to go ahead and assemble this together so we're going to do a 2 by 10 and then we're going to do our half inch of material and then we're going to do another 2 by 10 and then we're going to nail that together then we're going to add our spacer material and the other two by ten that we cut then just like before we'll go ahead and nail the crap out of it now there might be a standard practice for the amount of nails you need to put into this I'm sure that I did far more than I actually needed to but better safe than sorry at this point I was working with a terrible air compressor so many of my nails didn't sink all the way through but I just used a hammer to tap those in the rest of the way so the first thing that we have to do when installing a header is to get it in place and this can be pretty challenging when you are a one-man crew so I ended up using a few squeeze clamps that were three feet long and then I just slowly raised it until it was in position I mean yeah I could have wrestled it and looked a lot manlier but I figured I'll pay Myself by the hour so once it was in place I used a laser level to make sure that it was looking good and I could then move on to installing the Jack studs installing the Jack studs is really easy you just get them as close as you can by hand and then you Hammer them in the rest of the way but you just want to make sure that it is a snug fit you don't want to go too tight but you do want it pushing up on that header because this is load bearing then we'll go ahead and nail the Jack stud in place from both sides and we'll also nail in the header from the sides as well now for this wall which is not a load bearing wall I decided to build everything including the double top plate on the ground and you can see just how tight it is to actually get this to fit and if you watch this stud you can actually see it deflect as it gets more and more compressed between the floor joists and the ground and I'll be fixing this issue later on by adding some blocking between the studs so now that we've gone over building on the ground let's go ahead and run over building in place which is definitely my preferred method so I started by first installing my bottom and top plates and then I cut my studs to length and nailed them in between now you can see here that I actually cut them just a hair short but since it's a non-load bearing wall that's actually not going to be too much of an issue so next I'm building the rough open for a 32 inch door to the laundry closet I start by first adding the king studs as this is what we're going to reference off for the whole rough opening next I cut my Jack studs to length and installed them on the insides of those King studs after the Jack studs are installed I could then add the non-load bearing header or at least that's what I've been calling if you know the name for this go ahead and comment that down below and when that is installed I could then add the cripples but somehow I lost that footage so here they are and here you can see me installing the last couple walls which I actually did fairly early on when Framing and you can tell because I built them on the ground and stood them up which again I don't recommend and yes don't worry I did come back later and add the double top plate just like I did on the other walls so that's my two cents on how to frame your own basement I'm sure that there's tons that I missed or tons that I just did wrong so if there's anything like that that you caught go ahead and leave it in the comments so that we can all learn from each other I strive to make helpful content that everyone can learn from so if there's anything that you took away from this or if you enjoyed the video please consider subscribing to my channel as that's going to help me reach more people if you're interested in any of the tools that I was using throughout this project I have some Amazon affiliate links in the description and you can take a look at those so that's it for this one I'm Clayton the weekend Builder and I'll see you next time [Music] foreign

Channel: The Weekend Builder

Views: 178,980

Keywords: framing, basement framing, how to frame a basement, framing a basement, framing how to, diy ftaming, how to frame yourself, how to frame your basement diy, basement remodel

Id: OhCkPWMRJ3I

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2022