Start of Framing

We are finally at the framing stage! We’re so excited to see upward progress that we are visiting the house every evening after the workers leave to see what has been done. It’s important to note here that we are now living with Lexi’s brother and sister-in-law, so we are literally steps away from our build. That makes it hard to stay away when you’re excited about seeing progress 😆.

The first steps of framing involve getting the subfloor down. They installed all of our floor joists, the base pieces around the concrete foundation, and then nailed down the subfloor plywood.

When it comes to floor joists, something you want to consider is potential vibration in the floor when you walk around. You want to look at (really, talk to the professionals, that’s what we did 😉) the length of the spans your joists will need to cross. The longer the spans, the more potential for flex in the joists. Then you add weight on top of the floor, like cabinets and such, and the flexing can get more pronounced. This comes across as vibrations when you walk. For example, if you have ever walked past your kitchen island while dishes were sitting in the sink and you can hear them start to rattle as you walk by, that is what we’re talking about here.

Standard size of floor joists like the ones we used are 11 ⅞”. We have some pretty long spans the joists have to cross–the longest being the span the kitchen island will sit right in the middle of, so we decided to up the size of the joists to 14” to help keep vibration in the floor to a minimum. The thicker joists create more support and won’t flex as easily.

Next is actual upward progress. The framers start by chalk-lining the layout of your home on the subfloor and then get the exterior walls up first. They will build each wall on the ground and then put it upright once it’s together. Once it’s up, they put the zip board on the outside. The zip-system is an alternative to using regular structural OSB and putting a wrap around the house (like Tyvek). The zip-system is the OSB and wrap all in one.

After the exterior walls are up they work on the interior layout. This is currently where our progress is. We are able to truly walk the layout of our home now! We still need stairs put in, but they were quick to get the interior walls done and are ready to work on the roof now.

Framing will take 4-6 weeks in total for us. We are so excited with this progress, and we can’t wait to see these rooflines in real life.

We’ll be back at the end of framing with a final update on that 😊.