Wood Stud Wall Framing

hi Shannon here from host improvements today we're going to give you a video and this video today is going to be about laying out and building a wood stud wall okay so start out with basically what we're doing we're just doing a mock up today we don't have an on site situation where we can can do this video at the present time so we've just set up in the garage here and we're gonna build a temporary wall just for demonstration purposes basically we're gonna have a 12 foot long wall by 8 foot high and a little return over on this corner but this is totally for this demonstration of this video so that we can show you how to layout the wall as far as marking the studs out getting everything laid out on the wood and then we're gonna show you cutting the studs and fastening them in place and standing the wall up so to start with I've got on any exterior wall and some interiors as well you're gonna have three plates the plate is the bottom and top pieces of framing that these studs are attached to so if you can envision you know you've got bottom plate that's sitting down on the floor you got studs running up from it you've got a top plate on top all those and then you're gonna have a double top plate or a second plate on top of that and basically that that second plate is so that it at any intersections of walls you can tie the walls together good and solid because you can actually lap the top plate over the first plate of the wall and vice versa to to make the good secure joints so I'm gonna start out I'm going to show you we're gonna mark our walls out at 16 inches on center 16 inches on center and 24 inches on Center or your most common framing methods you know it just depends in your area what they call for or possibly the situation that you're actually framing for so we're gonna use 16 inches just for our demonstration so I've got right here on the sawhorses I've got the bottom plate and the top plate sitting here and these are the plates that I'm gonna mark out the 16 inch centers on so I'm gonna start here from my right hand end I'm gonna put these two plates tight together they're standing up on edge I want to make them flush down here on the right hand end okay and I'm gonna hook my tape at that end and and measure to be left from right to left so now the most important thing to remember is when you're laying this out whether it's 16 or 24 inch on center most tape measures have these increments kind of marked out here on my tape the 16 inch increments are they have a red square around them so that is my first 16 inch mark right there but to actually get the stud in the center of that mark I need to measure back from it 3/4 of an inch and this is where my mark will be to line up the edge of the studs as I install them so as long as I'm hooked on the end I want to always measure back that 3/4 of an inch the reason being is that as you can imagine as we have the studs along here in the wall and you get to your anywhere where your joints in your drywall or your plywood or anything like that are gonna be you want that joint to end up on the center of a stud and most of our sheet goods are in 8-foot or you know 2 foot type increments so this way when when you put your plywood on if this wall was laying on the ground you've put your plywood on flush to this end and you stretch it out here it's 8 feet long it should hit the center of that stud at 8 feet whether you're using 16 inch centers or 24 inches that will work out if you were to mark the lines rate at the the 16 inch interval and put the stud here your plywood's not going to hit every time you're gonna be cutting sheets all the time you know this just speeds things up and and is less cutting for when you come to assembly for sheathing so again basically what I'm doing I'm hooking right on the end of the wall I'm coming back to my right hand side 3/4 of an inch from the 16 inch interval I'm putting an X on the left side of that mark the X indicates where the stud will be placed on like on which side of the line so again my tapes still hooked down there I'm going to 32 inches which is my next 16 inch measurement coming back 3/4 of an inch X on the left and I'm just going to continue that all the way down these these two plates here and again on my tape measure they're all marked out handy right in red so it's very easy at a glance to know exactly where I've got a goal okay so once I've got those all on there I'm gonna take my speed square and I'm gonna square that line across so it's transferred on on both plates at the edge and I'm gonna also transfer the X onto the second plate as well so I'll go all the way down there and as we go along you're gonna see exactly why we need this these marks on there and how it all comes to be in the end of the end of framing this wall up okay so I've got all those marks transferred there now I'm going to lay these down flat and I'm actually going to transfer that same mark onto the flat edge here just quickly on both of them this layout some of the most important stuff you're gonna do because if you get it wrong you start framing the wall and get it half done and then realize it's wrong or in the wrong positions you're gonna have to go back and start changing a bunch of stuff so you want to want to make sure that you've got these all right exactly where you want them and obviously this wall that we're showing here right now today in this video is just straight stud work there's no windows no doors nothing so it's just straight a straight stretch of wall the speed square is very handy for this this type of work because it has a lip back here on the one side that you can easily put against the edge of your wood and it automatically squares you up you aren't trying to get an edge flush like on a large framing square okay so we've got those all marked out and we're ready to what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually frame the wall on the ground flat on the ground on the floor and once we have all the studs fastened in then we're gonna erect the wall we're gonna stand it up get it fastened in place so I just need a couple seconds to get that done okay so once you've marked out your plates you want to then figure out the height of your wall total height of your wall and then subtract the three thicknesses of your plate which are inch and a half each so you're gonna subtract four and a half inches from your total height that should give you your stud height okay so cut all your studs get them all cut to the height you've figured out for your project whether it be 2x4 or 2x6 again it's gonna depend on really exactly what you're doing if you're looking for a lot extra insulation you may want to buy six some building codes may require two by six for certain projects but really it's basically the same type of technology as far as how we cut it and erect it and put it together so okay so so we've already pre-cut all our studs again we're just doing a simple stud wall there's no windows or doors in this wall you can check out our other video to show you how to frame up for windows and doors using headers and everything else this one is strictly just the basic framing so so we've got it laid out here I've pre laid all my studs roughly into position between the bottom and top plates so that the crowns on all the all the two by fours are all going one direction by crown I'm talking about you want to look down the 2x4 or 2x6 whatever you're using and you're looking for which way it's curved this way or this way usually they're gonna have a crown one way or the other so if this one this one's not that bad but it's it's slightly this way I don't know if you can see that on the video but you want to put all those crowns the same direction whether it's up or down when you've got everything laying on the floor that'll give you a much flatter wall if you have them just all mish-mashed in there your have a crown up crown or crown in crown out when you go to put plywood on drywall on it's just gonna be all snaky so try to put them all the same way if you have any that are extremely more crowned one way or the other than everything else try not to use that one pick another piece of lumber so I like to lay them all crown up they sit better that way until you have them fastened and that's just my my method so I've got them all crown up I'm going to be attaching through the top plate and the bottom plate into each end of each stud each 2x4 with two deck screws okay it's more normally recommended that you would use nails in our case we're just doing a mock up so the series are going to be easier to disassemble this with so usually you would be using nails the reason being is their sheer strength is a lot better so it's usually much more recommended to nail it as opposed to screw it so we're using two screws and each end of each 2x4 stud if you're using two by sixes you want to have three screws or nails in the end of each one okay and so on like if you were using two by eights for some reason you're gonna have four so you're you're adding an extra nail every time you go up in width here of your framing number so I'm gonna go down here and start screwing the end of these first few in so I'm going to on this wall we're flushing up our stud right to the end of the plate and right to the top here so I've got that nice and flush here and here you could have somebody helping you who's who's actually making sure these are getting straight and and one person doing the screwing but usually one person can pretty much do it so now I've moved away from the end very n-1 now I'm going by the line that we marked across the face here so I want to put the face of this 2x4 this is a bad spot to show you let me move to the next one I'm going to put the face of this 2x4 to the line you can see our X that's where the the 2x4 is gonna go so I'm gonna line this up just like that nice and still there and flush to the top just like that same thing with the bottom screws now if you're gonna do a lot of screwing it's just maybe I'll mention it you may want this type of driver instead of just a normal screw gun normal screw gun a lot more energy to put the screws in that's always slipping in that the the impact driver like this is kind of has a bit of a hammering action which helps keep the tip embedded in the screws head a lot better so I'm just putting two in like I mentioned oncoming basically down I don't know if you can get a shot of this basically coming down you know half an inch three quarters of an inch putting my screw in same from the bottom I'm coming up a little bit putting it in if this was two by six I'd have my two outside ones and one in the center as well so I'm just gonna go right ahead I'm gonna screw all these studs in and then we're just about ready to stand this wall up something else worth mentioning is we're using three inch deck screws here so when that when they said deck screw goes into the tube through the plate of the 2x4 and to the stud you're wanting to get as much into the stud as you as you have for thickness here so you want a three-inch at least okay so whether you're using nails or screws you want you want to use a three inch screw here fastener okay so we've got our wall all still laying on the floor but everything is attached all the studs are screwed in we've also applied the the double top plate that's that second top plate I've left it back three and a half inches from this end in our mock up this is going to be an outside corner once once we get it standing up so the the other wall that butts into it will have a piece of plate that overlaps onto here and we add fasten it the double top plate you want to fasten basically at every stud put two more nails at every stud I didn't just because we're gonna be taking this apart but it that's how many nails you would need and then as we get down to this end that is presumably the end of your wall or you might might be continuing on with another chunk of wall the double top plate you want to leave it a couple stud spaces back from the from the joint in the wall so that you get a nice good overlap it makes it a lot stronger so by that I mean this typically if we were gonna put up another eight feet of wall separately we would cut this plate off back here somewhere there here and then the double top plate would splice across a good chunk four feet of this this wall and on to at least four feet of the other so you want to have nice big overlaps that makes it much stronger and straighter so I've got this one ready here I'm gonna just stand it into position we've got our little short wall just kind of standing there right now ready to accept this longer wall so I'm just gonna get turned around here okay so typically on the job site again depending what you're doing you may have a line snapped on the floor or you might maybe you're lining up with the outside edge of a concrete pad or wood floor or whatever you know you're gonna have some kind of system already marked out to get yourself in the right position you're gonna so you're gonna get your wall street to that you're gonna get your corner all lined up so this stud on the on the end of this short wall flush to here you want to get that all lined up same thing with down at the bottom you get this all nice and flush they're tight together and then you'll be able to screw this all together as well as go up top as you work along they're getting everything flush and screwing that double top plate in so I'm just gonna stitch the bottom of this together and work my way up to the wall getting everything nice and flushed and tight and I'm screwing about every every two feet or so up to you're just kind of working it along making sure you're keeping everything nice and flush okay and then when you get up to the very top this is what that intersection was I was explaining here's the double top plate on this wall and it's over lapping onto our wall around the corner so we want to screw down through here with four screws four nails and your case and that'll tie this corner together okay so we've got the wall all standing up here we've tied our corner together in a normal situation this would be a little more solid than that if you are doing this on site you may want to add some braces for wind and that sort of thing where you would tack it to the wall and maybe two staked it to the ground or to a fence if there's one close by or something like that just to take some of the weave out of it it also help you straighten it out something else we didn't talk about if this was an exterior wall so you're building a shed or you know maybe a small addition on your house or something like that a grad before you stood these walls you probably want to put your sheathing you're outside sheathing on so whether that be plywood OSB whatever the case is you would have your wall laying on the ground just as we did with all the studs in square up your wall section and the simplest way to do that is to measure diagonally corner to corner and once that diagonal measurement is the same you know that your wall is sitting square once you've got that then you could start sheeting you're putting your sheathing on the ply on the wall while it's laying down just makes it a lot simpler with the sheathing just remember stagger stagger your joints at least you know to stud space if you can from the rule blow it get that all on there you're gonna have a little heavier wall and a lot more solid wall to stand up one thing to remember is wind factors if you're standing a wall up that has the sheeting on it and it's a breezy day you want to make sure you have enough people there to handle that wall because that's like trying to stand a sail up in the middle of the wind it's gonna catch that wind and maybe take off on you so you don't want anybody hurt you don't want to hurt anybody else's property or damage anything so just be cautious with that in this case we just wanted to show you the actual framing process how to lay it out how to fasten them in how to tie in your your abutting walls and that sort of things so um we've got that all on there we've got the wall standing and I don't know that there's much more to show yeah I guess I could show you the back the back on an inside corner if if this was going to be inside a room like inside your house here and this was gonna be drywalled or something you know your inside corners you may want to add some extra backing in here usually referred to as an al and it could be screwed together with these two pieces and what it does is it forms an inside corner here so you have somewhere to screw your drywall to I don't know if you want to come around to this side if you can see that so once it's in once it's in place like I said you have you have a surface on both sides of the wall to screw that drywall to so with the drywall is not just floating in here okay so you can add that anywhere else that you need some other blocking and of course make sure you fasten the bottom of the walls down to whatever you're framing on whether it be concrete wood whatever with concrete you can use drilling hammering anchors or you know whatever your local area recommends okay so it's time to wrap up this video so we've we've done the video now for some basic wall framing we've tried to cover things as far as the types of fasteners some of the building products spacing out your studs how to lay it out all kind of good stuff so hopefully you found that informative and we do have other related videos and articles on framing and such so if you want to check out our youtube channel or and see our other videos or click on through to our home home page or webpage and there you'll also find a forum if you have any questions asked about this or any other video you can go to the forum and ask away I'll do my best to answer what I what I can't

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 3,675,509

Rating: 4.8233957 out of 5

Keywords: Wood, stud, wall, construction, build, house, shed, framing, nail, building, plan, design, basement, DIY

Id: p6vq-cOAi0Y

Length: 22min 24sec (1344 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2011