Office Space- Framing, part 1
Posted by Wayne
Probably the most difficult part of finishing this unused space would be the framing (or more accurately, preparing the room for drywalling). When we were looking at buying this house I took a quick look in this space and I thought this would probably be an easy task. However, after living in the house for a while and examining the room more thoroughly I recognized several problems with the space (perhaps explaining why the previous owners left the space unfinished when they were finishing the basement right outside the door).
The first obvious problem was that 3 of the walls were cement foundation (the other wall was framed with 2×4 studs). The cement walls would require that I put up some shallow framing on them so I would have something to screw the drywall to.
Another thing that I noticed was that the walls were not square to each other. In the image below I’ve estimated the angles of the corners. Because we wanted to put a desk in the room, the room being anything less than square was unacceptable because I believed once you put a square desk in the room you would quickly notice all of the funky angles.
Although I could have just framed and drywalled as is, I really didn’t want to spend all the time finishing the room only to find I had created a room that you have to stumble around in like a drunk because your subconscious brain could tell the walls were all going in different directions.
After much thought, I determined that the wall that would give me the most trouble would be the wall that was already framed. A steel I-beam ran along the top of the wall and extended several inches into the room, and to drywall that I knew it was going to require some creative thinking. Another issue with the I-beam was that the door fit snugly under it without any room to spare, and once I drywalled underneath the I-beam there would be absolutely no space at all between the top of the door and the drywall. Technically that would be functional, but I thought it would look very amateurish.
The thing that bugged me the most though was that on top of the I beam there was another thick piece of wood that extended ever further out into the room. I didn’t want a two tiered ’step’ in the ceiling of the room (see image below), and I also wanted to keep the distance which the one ’step’ extended into the room to a minimum. I couldn’t cut the wood flush to the edge of the I-beam with a circular saw because the shape of the I-beam and the tight space prevented me from doing so. This left me with three options:
I decided to lower the ceiling by 2″ to make it flush with the top of the I-beam. All this required was that I run 2″x2″ lumber across the ceiling perpendicular to the floor joists. I didn’t think this lowering of the ceiling would be noticeable in the final product (and it turned out I was right).
The second issue of the I-beam was how I was going to drywall it. I knew I couldn’t screw the drywall into the I-beam, so I was going to have to attach a piece of wood to it somehow. However, I couldn’t attach any wood to the bottom of the I-beam because there just wasn’t any room and I would have to find another way to attach drywall to it.
What I decided to do for the side of the I-beam was to drill pilot holes and secure a 2×4 to it with molly bolts because the other side of the I-beam was inaccessible. The 2×4 had to be slightly shimmed out to be flush with the I-beam edges (see image below). Once the 2×4 was in place I could screw the drywall to it and cover the I-beam.
My brother came up with the solution to the bottom of the I-beam. He mentioned to me that he had a piece of 1/8th inch drywall at his house (I was using 1/2 inch drywall for everything else) and thought I could use contact cement to secure it to the underside of the I-beam. That solution would give the bottom of the I-beam a drywall surface and still be very thin, preserving the small space between the bottom of the I-beam and the top of the door.
In part 2 I’ll talk about how I applied framing to the cement walls and squared up the room.
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