How To Layout a Building: The Start of a Build Series

hey what's up guys I know I always get a lot of questions and I think this will be a great tutorial for people that are looking to lay out a building site really laying out anything there's a couple things that you first have to do one you have to know your grade which is your elevation you need to know where you want your finished whatever it is whether it's concrete a building site whatever it is what you want that grade elevation to be and then what you also need to do is you need to find your constant points your constant line so I'm going to show you guys all that we're gonna lay out this building it's a little bit complicated because it's not just a square so we've got a couple little ins and outs we've got a porch and we'll take you through the whole process well first we have to do is you can see over here we've got we got a house so our customer is building a house at the same time and he wants our building finished floor to be six inches below the wall on his building so we're gonna take this great stick we've got it already zeroed out at that wall and I'm gonna basically just get this pad to the point where it is minus 12 inches and at that point that's where our sonotubes are going to go in so that's what I'm looking for so that our finished grade can end up being minus 6 all right so I talked about greed that is important when laying out a site so that everything starts right so that's the first thing we did luckily the Builder was here he was able to bring his machine and make quick work of this pad pushing it out getting it back down to where it should be and then I just you know kind of won over it with a fine-tooth comb with the Kubota and got it you know Peck back down tight and leveled out pretty good so that we can now determine where all of our locations go so that brings us to our second point so now that we've got our elevation figured now we're gonna get our constant line so right here and all the way down here are two pins that were dropped this is the property lines so this string line is defining what we're trying to square up against so of course we've got the stabile ax the L a 180 L and we've got it plumb bob down right where we want our front line to be squared off it's going to be squared this way so we're setting our Caston over here where we know this is a fixed point the laser is talking to the receiver right now getting locked on to that line so we've set the laser off of this constant line you can see customer was nice enough to find the pins on his property and drop these stakes with this string line so we got the 180 L sitting on the front line of our building we measured off of the back lot line to determine that this is where he wanted the start of the building to be so now we're gonna use the layout station to give us a perfect 90 off of this constant line and that will give us our new constant line that we will actually square and make the whole layout on the building four and that'll be this front wall very important to always make sure especially when laying out somebody else's building that you take the time to find out exactly where it should be because the last thing you want to do is build something and have somebody say oh you're off all right so there we go we use the layout station to get a perfectly square line off the property line we pulled our measurements which were supposed to be 40 feet off of the property line customers said give them an extra foot just to be safe so we've got our two corners marked this is now going to become our constant line on our building and all of our other measurements will be pulled off of these because we've just determined it to be square to his property line which is what he wanted now we've got to get a corner here a corner here there's an inside corner another outside corner and then there's a porch that we're gonna dig over there so now that we have our front line established we've got our dimensions measured out we've got our jet stakes in our back boards kind of loosely set up we're gonna take one tape measure off of one front mark and the other tape measure off of the other corner and we're gonna use a calculator what I talked about so what I'm doing is the front line of our building is 43 foot 9 inches long okay and the reason it's not a full 44 is because this is our post layout not the outside dimension of the building once we run our inch and a half Gertz it will be a full 44 inches but for now we're just laying out our post measurements so at 43 9 that's my run my rise voicemail is 38 foot what in the let's do it again 43 foot 9 inch run 38 foot 9 inch rise so there's my rise my run and this is the measurement I really need 58 5 and 5/16 so what I'm gonna do is this tape measure right here is coming off the front that's my 38 foot 9 what was that 58 5 and 5/16 so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this tape measure coming from that point way over there what was it Greg 58 5 and 5/16 yeah that's good double-check all this talking fifty-eight five and 5/16 so I'm gonna find your burning a foot dick dirt exact no no that's fine they just want to know what you're doing so I can be on the same page and I'm gonna pull both of these tight and wear this tight line is that is gonna give me the back square points so that's gonna give you my third corner and I'll do the exact same thing only I'll flip-flop it to get the other corners and that's what's gonna give you a perfectly square layout to start your building so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw a little picture here and I'm gonna overlay it while I talk what I've got going on is this building is not a perfect square so we've determined our three I guess what I'm gonna say longest dimensions but then there's gonna be a little bit of a stair step in the back wall so what we're gonna do is we're gonna use the same Pythagorean theorem on the calculator to determine this back corner that is not the full 44 foot that the front wall is it's only gonna be 24 foot so we're gonna put in our calculator 23 foot 9 inches and then we're gonna put the 38 foot 9 inches which is our end wall length and we're gonna use those two dimensions to determine this back corner and then we've got a little bit of an instep that we're also gonna have to figure out because this job what happened is the variance and code on this site required the customer to only have X amount of square footage and I don't remember for this 2400 square foot that seems like a lot it might have only been like 1400 I don't remember but we had to kind of play with the building he needed the forty feet depth 39 foot so that he could get his boat and trailer in but then he didn't need that deep of a building for the rest of it so he we went ahead and did this little jog probably cost him more money it's always cheaper to go big and square but I think he's gonna add a little bit of a detail to the building that'll make it unique and kind of fun to you know follow along with so make sure you hit that subscribe button and follow along to this job 45 5 3/8 45 5 3 h and yours a cat won't 0 45 5 3 AIDS a rock a little bit more difficult than a standard building because we've got basically if you want to look at it like a rectangle here that is 23 foot 9 inches sorry 28 foot 9 inches by 44 feet and then we've got a rectangle that kind of sits this way that's 24 by 38 so we're gonna determine those two squares and we've also marked in the middle of this line where it should line up with that little indented area and when we put all these four lines up on each square we should get a point somewhere in this area that's going to be our inside corner and I could set a jet stake here with a couple couple jet stakes and a bat board that's by the way that is what Greg is guessing it to be I'm sure he's close but I don't want any bat boards and jet stakes in the middle of the building so that when we go to dig nothing is in our way we can just drop our strings and go now the only thing that we haven't done is there's a porch over here and we use the layout station to determine the front corner so at least I know this is where the corner of the porch post is gonna go and I can just kind of rough estimate based off of all these lines once we get them up exactly where the other two posts are gonna go because I want to try to dig these holes at the same time while the concrete trucks here and I want to bring in one yard of concrete for three holes but this grade is a little bit off it's a little bit muddy I don't know if I'm gonna do it yet I haven't determined but just in case we've got that there also and we'll use all these lines that we're determining to get these two porch posts but it's all the same way it's all math guys it's all math now when doing our batter board some people call them I call them just a bat board we're just driving in some concrete jet stakes and we always try to make it so that you can see here this is just an eyeball representation of the corner when we put our string through here you don't want your jet stakes in the way so you're gonna have a line coming through this way and then from down there you'll have a line coming in this way so we're just keeping them out of the building pad or the actual building dimension enough that we can dig our holes and not disturb anything here so once we get them kind of just rough located and our jet stakes pull you know pushed in the ground then we're gonna come through with the laser and set all of our batter boards or bat boards to a certain elevation that way we know when we set our tubes and we set our brackets the string lines are all level that's another thing that's important I think because if you're using your string lines to check square on the building pad and they're not level if they're like this you know yeah you could only be off 1/32 or maybe a sixteenth but you know it doesn't take a whole lot of time to you've already got the laser out you already know grade and elevation so just use it to set your batter boards and when a customer shows up they're not like why is that board all cockeyed it just looks better what I mean with the grade stick is since I've already determined where my grade is I've set it so that all of the batter boards and I think oh hey turn it on let it calibrate without the laser on it and I wanted to take you guys at advice and sorry I turned the volume down a little but anyway you can see now the bat board sitting right where we want it so we can go check all of these to be the same way as we're installing them so what we're doing come up a little bit more right there Greg and that's where we're gonna install this batter board up just down right there I've seen a lot of people do their bat boards differently where they'll do like a V all the way out I find this to be easier because it only takes one board to jet stakes and you'll get both of your lines off of the same one so hopefully this is a good representation of what we got going on now we've got this rectangle here and then we've got the rectangle that is formed right here and when we connect these two squares or rectangles together with strings it's going to give us our point right in the middle and these jet stakes and batter boards are just up long enough to set our brackets and then stand our walls and then we'll get them out of here so once we've got our pins in the ground our batter boards are all set up we're gonna take our string line and we're gonna pull it through over top of our nail okay this was our initial one we don't want that one anymore we're looking at this guy and then I'm just going to make a mark right on my batter board just gonna set it a little shingle nail here now let me show you a little trick on this string line a nice knot I kind of get it tugged you know snug I guess get a little snug tug Greg and then I take the string and this is gonna be the Boy Scout and me showing you a little knot I take the rope or string over my hand and then I just pull it through the back side what that's gonna do it's gonna give me a nice little knot here that's not going to go anywhere but when I'm done I can take both of these strings and it's gonna make a liar out of me well usually it works you know break it I'm gonna break it I don't want to do it I must have think I can get real hard I do this the same way and we mess it up every time every time it's nice if you notice we set that little mark out there right here there's an a nail and it looks like it's right underneath our streamline so that means we did at least one thing right so now that we have the front string line determined all we're gonna do is we're going to use these same nails and we're gonna pull basically we're just gonna pull strings over top of the nails we set and then we'll check square with the string lines themselves so I'm gonna let Greg do it just kids out legger you you do it yeah I've taught you this man show the world you do it my way you're gonna do it your way do it our way all right Rev Run Willie wait bro let me see let me see okay so take a take us through this what are you gonna do you're gonna wrap it around your fingers wrap it around your hand twice it twice you need to bring that up and through and then that didn't work out because I don't like to according to my way so I like taking it spinning it get a nice loop grab it and boom so you'll never be a teacher because you did that so fast and said didn't grab this matter let's do it one more time and show the wait did you see that see that it just turned into a string again with no nuts so pick us through that Greg you're gonna grab it twist it flip it and reverse it okay you're gonna flip your hand around and around spin it once yep yeah what wait so what you're doing here is you've twisted it around the rope yeah and you're gonna grab yep that little guy yep and let through your loop and what you've done is you've created some sort of a slipknot right here and what that's gonna do is it'll give you your tension so you can get it down and get it down on your nail that we set and then you can kind of tighten it up but what's great is when you're all said and done show us Greg done you're gonna take that up and boom pull it and it's good to go magic Gregg were you an Eagle Scout nope boom so there you go right through our nails and once we get the rest of these strings up it's time to check square and make sure it's perfect so this is another reason we like to make sure all of our batter boards are perfectly level and laser shot because when you go to put your strings over top of other strings you don't want them pushing or moving them you want them all to be at the same plane so what happens is the friction of the two strings together can actually move your strings in a position that you don't want them to so you want them to be nice and free floating great I'm gonna try it your way go ahead and do your knot okay I'll do okay you go ahead and do yours and then we'll show you guys how I do it which is probably not the right way but it's just my way and I'm okay with that Gregg you hear that I don't have an ego problem whatever so I like to just kind of find out where my tension point is I wrap it around my hand and pull through and I get the same exact effect so I just wrap around once and then I pull it through I don't have to be all you know I'm gonna do my wrist this way and I don't fit and reverse it but it's just a simple knot most people are probably already gonna know it we use it all the time out here on the post frame site and then you can kind of tighten it up give it a nice little backwards tug and that kind of locks it in place okay hey there's more than one way to skin a cat Gregg your way is just fine for you and my way is just fine for me was better though all right there we go we've got all of our strings up we're gonna double check them now with tape measures in all of our you know corner points and everything you can see here this is what's giving us our inside corner so we'll end up having a post right here and our wall Gertz will come into it Gregg was super spot-on on this line but just about a foot off so I'd say more like 12 inches off on his dimension pretty accurate Gregg check our our corners and I wanted this at forty four nine it's actually forty three nine but he's burning me a foot on the other end which means instead of you know holding the tape measure right on the string line he's actually holding it at one foot it's a little bit easier and more accurate so what I need to do is adjust my string Lang accordingly so what I've done is I've come up and I've measured a difference here so I'm gonna set a new nail here put the string line over and make sure that you pull your other nail out the reason being is there's gonna be a point where you're gonna pull these string lines off to do your hole digging and whatnot you don't want a guy coming back and having to guess which one that you're supposed to go on so I'll set a new nail and I'll pull the old nail alright guys so now that we've gone around we've checked all of our external dimensions so what we've done is we've pulled off of all the corners to check that our strings are at least the right distances apart but the most important is that are we square so what we're gonna do is we're gonna burn a foot on this end we've got our diagonal in the calculator is 45 what was it great 45 and 3/8 okay but we're burning the foot so we're burning a foot so I'd say that is money spot-on now I know what you guys are gonna say is well what do you do if it's off so let's go ahead and check some other squares and see if we are off because one of them has to be off right Gregg I mean there's a good possibility that one will be off most likely it'll be close okay let's clear this we're gonna go 28 foot 9 inch and 43 foot 9 inch it's gonna give us a forty fifty two four and three sixteenths Craig so you're looking for fifty three four and three sixteenths okay so good this one is more like fifty three just shy of fifty three four which means we've got to move this about a quarter of an inch we got to make this diagonal about a quarter inch longer so we've got a couple options now remember we want to keep this line our constant and we've got to kind of stretch this corner so what we got to do is we're gonna have to move this line here and the line way over there we got to bring them both our way but first what we're gonna do is we're gonna double check this diagonal to confirm that it needs to move a quarter-inch because there could be air somewhere in the outside dimensions as well so let's go ahead and do that but most likely what we'll do is we'll just move this guy you can see we already moved it about a quarter we're gonna probably need to move it just a little bit more than another corridor to get this diagonal dimension correct so we'll check this first and we'll see if we're off okay so what we did was we had an off dimension from this this point up here so we went to the farthest point because I like to go and get the biggest squares possible perfect and then work down from there so once again we're pulling diagonal we're looking for 50 what is it 55 5 and no 58 but we're Burton 499 five and 5/16 so I think this is good so what we've got going on is there's something going on right in here which I kind of expected just because it's a little bit unique so we're gonna play around with some dimension so what we're gonna do is we're gonna measure this dimension to make sure that when we pull from that string line for that wall that this is actually 43 9 and I would say we're about an 1/8 inch almost shy so that is gonna push that line out and give us a little bit more in our diagonal the thing to remember is when we're doing this like we're spending a lot of time to try to make it perfect we might never get it perfect and if we really wanted to set the layout station up on every string line we could confirm that it is perfectly square but this goes back to that hole you know first off not everybody has aa la 180 l $1,500 layout station if you want one I'll go ahead and put the link down below so you can get yourself one but the goal is to get as close as possible because I promise you if you're within sixteenths everybody down the line from the Builder to the finish guy inside they're gonna be very happy with you I know I was going to show you guys but we really didn't have to do much all we had to do was move a couple of these string lines over just a little bit so once you make your adjustments never change your constant line that front line was always going to be constant because it was square with the property line so all of our adjustments were done in the back side and we just had to come over about 1/8 to 3/16 and you can see where we originally put our nail you know this is kind of a this is loose so it's not perfectly perfect so when we're setting our string lines over these nails we're kind of guesstimating to get really close with our batter boards and then all of your final adjustments are done right here now that this is determined we can pull measurements off of these corners and Mark all of our hole locations to then get our holes dug and get this building going so now we're going through we got our marks all laid out and you'll notice these monster X's that's about 4 foot and that is because when we dig our hole if we encounter any debris down low that moves our auger around we're gonna be able to visually see that because if you don't make a big enough X as soon as you go to dig your hole you lose the the trace of where exactly you're supposed to dig so we've got all of our X's laid down and I don't ever like doing these close together because basically this is just going to become one monster hole that's just the way it's gonna happen and that one down there is even worse but I guess we won't really know until we start digging there is enough moisture in the ground that it might stay together fairly decent we'll see so I hope you guys enjoyed this little tutorial video I don't know if it's you know extremely useful for everybody out there but a lot of people have to lay out you know whether it be a patio a driveway a house or building you know whatever it is you can use these principles to hopefully help your layout go even more efficiently and hopefully even more perfect so that is always the goal although nobody's perfect we all know that I appreciate you guys watching the video and hopefully if you enjoyed it and you are enjoying other videos on this channel you will hit that subscribe button and drop me a thumbs up and a comment down below on what you liked or disliked about this video or even some other content that you are looking forward to our building showing off and I will do the best to make that happen so you guys have a great day and I'm gonna go grab lunch and come back and start digging holes I hit something

Channel: RR Buildings

Views: 838,265

Rating: 4.9256411 out of 5

Keywords: post, frame, layout, how to layout a building, laying out a site, mancave, building a building, how to build a shop, building a barn, stabila, site, elevation, grade, finding grade, how to find grade, how to find elevation

Id: pdjrOK5R36M

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 24 2018

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