Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Framed!

Last week my brother came to visit, and as is our usual custom we put him to work. He is a talented builder, full of knowledge and tricks from the building trade gleaned from several years of construction and remodeling experience. He earned his stripes again on this project: the framing of the bedroom closet. Kudos to you, Christopher--doing this alone would have been a nightmare!

The first wall is up. Note the right sexy true 2x4 home-milled hemlock boards, turned on edge to maximize the interior space of the closet:

Here's the, um, backside of our site manager putting the finishing touches on the outlet on the south side of the closet (second wall up):


And voila! Two walls are up:


We know that we're going to repaint the whole room when the closet's finished. So we don't have to meddle with pieces of paper that get lost. We can figure out all of our measurements right on the wall:



When we designed this closet, I thought it would be cool to have an outlet on the top surface, in case we decided to use the space above less for storage and more for some sort of decorative lighting. So we made sure to include power to the roof:



It turned out that putting a thick, 5/8" sheet of plywood on the roof would be essential to keeping the doorway of the closet square. (Squaring it up took some serious grunt work to rack the whole frame, and some cleverness on Christopher's part to get it to stay. That's the consequence, I guess, of using hemlock lumber and 20d nails.) So I put several more screws in the roof than code required, to keep the frame in the right place:


With cathedral ceilings, there's plenty of room up there. Here I am with upstairs hallway far below:


And here she is, all framed out. We decided that if a tornado ever rips through our little creek valley, we're skipping the bathroom and getting into this closet:


Next step: drywall. It's my second least favorite part of construction; but it'll give the whole thing a little more aesthetic appeal.

~emrys

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