The Fundamentals of Wall Framing with Steve Baczek Architect

hey everybody welcome back to the build show i'm steve basic registered architect up here in massachusetts and on today's video we're going to talk about just the the fundamentals of wall framing so i have a new house here under construction you can see the rough framing here behind me um and we're going to talk about the particulars so break out my tape measure i'm not pretending to be a carpenter here but this is just my trusty pointer for the day let's at first talk about some of the just common pieces of framing so down here we have a bottom plate we have our common stud we have a king stud king stud notice it's just a common stud but basically the king stud aligns with jack studs the jack studs are basically what carries the header the header is the piece that's up here that basically carries the floor frame above the window so that's basically a small structural beam at every window and door opening right and if you notice here the framing numbers here are quite wide we can frame walls in america typically two by four two by six sometimes 2x8 i do a lot of very energy efficient homes so i fall into that 2x6 2x8 category very quite often so you'll see here 2x8 frame the spacing of the common joists we don't have a big wall here but you'll notice the common stud here the next common is over here this is just a basically picks up the slack between the header and the plate of the window but notice that this spacing here is a little wider than normal so typically in america we frame our framing members on 16 inches on center we also have the opportunity to push them to 24 inches on center a lot of times when i do these deeper members of two by eight because of the added strength in those members i push that spacing out to the 24 inches on center now a lot of you might have heard the terms advanced framing optimal value engineering or ove framing those are just simple terms that talk about how can i take a wall and take the wood out of the wall but still be structurally sound right because right here we have an example of the three major parts of any wall system right we talked about the common stud or the framing this is the stud cavity which is where insulation will go basically in there and then the third part of any wall is the doors or windows now commonly we associate our value with the depth of the insulation in the cavity right so if i put an r30 bat in here i would call it an r31 but the reality is it's not quite an r30 wall because i have a number of framing members you can see just in this small section we have quite a bit of framing and the r value of wood is roughly about 1.25 per inch so in that seven inches we're talking you know in the 9 our 9 ish range a far cry from the r30 that's three times more in the cavity than the framing and then over here in the windows we can have an r value that ranges anywhere from say r 3 ish up through about r 8. we have a bunch of windows in here we're going to talk about that in a later video about performance and windows but but understand the three major components of a wall system now the other thing to understand is not only that these three components exist but they exist in certain percentages right so the cavity cavity plus or minus about 65 of the wall is uh is insulation windows in an average house you're probably somewhere in the 18 to 20 22 percent range and then framing is usually around 15 plus or minus now the framing depends on you know the framers and how much wood do they put in what type of framing the location coastal location stiffness of the wall there's a bunch of parameters that play a role in how much framing goes in the wall but if you exercise advanced framing and value and optimal value engineering you could probably get about a six to eight percent shift in cavity space versus framing space or what i like to call the framing space as opaque area right so that we don't have insulation there so again cavity insulation opaque area window 65 15 and what does that leave me with 20 left for the windows so those are some very rough percentages and and the point here is not to get caught up in the math but just to understand when i call out an r21 wall r30 wall as being insulated i'm really calling center of cavity insulation depth and r value there i'm not really talking about the whole wall r value right to continue on with the wall system here understand a couple things one because this is on 24 inches on center we have a double top plate up here two two by eights now the reason we have double top plates is because we have a 24 inch on center wall frame but we only have a 16 inch on center floor frame up here so you'll notice that while this one perfectly aligns there's an 8 inch shift here in framing that's the 24 inch versus the 16 and then the eight inch shift on the other direction and then we catch back up here on the 48 inch dimension because the 24 inch spacing and the 16 inch spacing both fall on a four foot layout right so the double top plate plays a role there the other thing that i like to do there's a lot of discussion about how to insulate headers remember cavity versus opaque area window area well the header has the potential to become a real big opaque area in our house so we want to provide some insulation in there a lot of architects framers builders they'll sandwich rigid foam in there and um create a insulated header there sometimes they put the foam to the outside sometimes they put it to the inside what i typically do is i try and size all my headers to the same depth in the case of this house they're all nine and a half inches because i have seven and a quarter inches in wall width i have the ability to do a single ply double ply triple or quad fly header if i need to be so i gained my strength and the number of flies of that ldl header but in the in the smaller openings like this 32 inch opening you notice that it leaves what i call a pocket i call it a header pocket because that way there it allows the insulator to insulate that pocket just as a shallow cavity and the beauty of this is is that not only does the insulator get to do it but the insulator does it on his time when he's here doing the rest of the wall so it really doesn't take the framer and put him into some crazy sequence with the insulator or forcing the framer to fuss around with rigid foam the framer gets to do what he does on his time and then the insulator comes and does what he does on his time so it makes for a pretty good effort there in in coordination between the framer and insulator the last part of the wall let's talk about corners corners are infamous for becoming cold spots in the wall this is a two stud corner or what's called the california corner i don't quite understand where that came from i guess california first wants to do it but the thing to understand is we don't have your typical u-shaped channel out there that box is in a cavity that we can't insulate this one here is basically this stud with a little uh piece of wood here to catch the drywall but understand that this cavity goes all the way back to that plane of the wall so it allows for that full insulation inside the wall there and those california corners again enhance the wall and they provide an optimum insulation capacity to the wall system as opposed to just having this closed off and letting here you get to see it again on this side that's an inside california corner this is an outside california corner so you'll see that as this corner turns we don't have that pocketed stud here we actually just carry this wall all the way out so we get that full depth cavity all the way across here and then as we turn the corner it dumps down into that cavity there so that's the basics on wall framing we're going to jump over to the drawing board we're going to talk about this a little bit more i'll enhance some of these concepts there so see you in a bit hey welcome everybody back at the drafting table here um [Music]

Channel: Build Show

Views: 27,033

Keywords: framing, steve baczek, architecture, wall framing, house framing, framing 101, how to frame a house, framing a house, construction framing, wood framing, stick framing, anatomy of framing, build show, build show network

Id: clLd9LFT6PA

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020