Framing the Sunroom

Welcome back to the home addition/remodel. Today we’re going to get started on some wall framing, which will transform the space into the actual space finally. 

Before we jump into actually working, Donavon has been doing a lot of the plate layouts this morning, and we’re going to do a quick plans review to give you a better idea of what it is we’re building here today. 

We’re going to start off with the elevation view of the sunroom area that we’re working on. Right now we are working on the area with five windows facing to the east. There’s one stationary window and two crank out windows on either side of that. Both inside and outside, it’s all trim around the windows. 

Looking at the inside view of the windows, this is the same elevation. Because of the foundation we laid, both of these walls are going to be about 10.25 inches thick in order to even it out.

The ICFs are 13 inches wide, and because of the way we lined the ICFs on this, we’ve got about two inches of foam that overlapped onto the old garage. The inside of the concrete and the outside of the block actually match up, but in order to line up this wall it has to be about 10 and a quarter inches thick. 

Therefore, this wall is going to be the same, about 10 and a quarter inches deep on the framing. Then the third wall is going to be 2×6, and all of the interior walls are 2×4. Everything will look symmetrical when we’re done. 

There really isn’t a whole lot of actual wall because the walls are windows and trim, so the layout’s fairly important. The architect spent a lot of time on it, and he was able to lay it out with stock windows. 

With the door, the hinge point will be well inside the wall, so the extension is on the outside and the door will be flush when it’s closed. 

This line is the wall of the first addition, which will be going away with this new addition. We have LVLs that will be going in there to carry the weight for the second floor and the roof. That’s a little bit down the road right now.

First: we need to go up here and figure out this rot. We have to take that apart and then figure out where our ceiling height is. Once we have that height established, we’ll be able to figure out the height of our studs. Then we’ll cut the studs to match that for the outside. 

After a little bit of exploring, we found our final wall height, which is 97 and an eighth, minus our two plates takes us to 92 and five eighths. Now I get to cut a bunch of studs!

Unfortunately, this will be all the progress today. We were getting ready to install the ledger where all the joists will hang from. We found out that the LVLs they sent out with our pile of lumber yesterday are 18-footers, which are too short for here. We need 20s (technically we will cut them to 19 and change). The constant theme we’re having with this project is that something always goes wrong on Wednesday. So for the rest of today, I’m going to keep staging materials for tomorrow, bringing over the trusses, bringing over some of the sheathing, and getting things a little more organized. 

Happy Thursday, everybody! If we go off of what’s happened historically, Thursday is usually a pretty good day. Donavan picked up our 20-foot LVLs yesterday, so those are here and ready to go. 

Right now Donavan is getting ready to cut the line in the wall. He is going to cut one inch out of that OSB all the way across. Otherwise, it’ll stick down into the ceiling later.

Next wall is going up, and we are going to find the height for our filler and the rough opening for the door, which sets the height for the rough opening for all of the top row windows. 

I have all these sills cut and ready to go. Next up I’m going to cut 20 pieces at 10 and a quarter while Donavan installs them. 

All of our rough openings for our windows are installed, which is pretty darn cool. We are shifting gears now, and we are working on the ledger that goes up on the house.

We cut a little patch to replace that rotten section.

And next we are getting the joist hangers installed. 

We have the top plates sitting up there ready to be nailed on. We just checked the wall, and it’s straight. So Donavan’s going to keep working on this side while I go play joist hanger.

Time to measure for our joists. We’re a little longer on one end because of how the house met up with the addition. So every joist is going to be custom-ish, progressively longer or shorter depending on what end you started on.

Now we are putting in the ceiling joists.

So today, we did all of the rough openings all the way around. Put up the north wall, got one ledger, one rim joist, and all of the ceiling joists installed. It’s starting to feel like an actual room.

That’s going to do it for this one. Tomorrow we’re going to get back to this and put a roof on and do some sheathing. So we’ll see you tomorrow for all that! 

Thank you as always for joining me, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the home addition, anything in the shop, or anything for Donavan (make sure you ask him lots of questions), please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. Until next time, happy woodworking!

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