Office Space- Framing, part 2
Posted by Wayne
Squaring up the room while attaching wood framing was a fairly simple task, but it was time consuming. By measuring an equal distance from the framed wall in two spots and connecting the dots I was able to get a parallel line which I drew on the floor with a marker and the straight edge of my level. I wanted this parallel line to be exactly 1 inch from the cement wall in the narrowest place (the top right of the image below) because I would be starting with a 1 inch piece of wood for my framing. As I went down the wall the framing would have to get thicker and thicker to keep it even with the line I had drawn on the floor. As long as the framing was built out to that line, I knew I’d have a square room when I drywalled.
Attaching the strips of wood to the cement walls proved to be difficult and frustrating. I was using a masonry gun similar to the one pictured below. This is actually a small gun powered by .22 caliber blanks that fires a nail when it is loaded, pressed against a solid surface, and struck with a hammer. Firing a .22 shell in a 6×10 space is extraordinarily loud, and I immediately recognized other issues that I had never seen before with this tool.
The problem I was running into was that about every other nail I’d fire through the board and into the wall would not penetrate the concrete and would either not go all the way in or just mash against the concrete and shatter the board in the process. I ruined many boards and tried everything from pre-drilling holes into the wood to pre-drilling holes into the concrete. The darned concrete was just too hard. I’ve since heard that old concrete that is 100% cured can be too hard to shoot a nail into with one of these things.
Instead I had to resort to using concrete screws to secure the boards to the cement. Concrete screws are recognizable by their unique threading and blue color. Using concrete screws required predrilling of the board and the concrete and countersinking the screw. After EXTREMELY slow going trying to drill into the concrete with a masonry bit in my corded drill (I’m talking like 10 minutes per hole), I went to Home Depot and bought a hammer drill for about $65. A hammer drill is a drill with an in and out hammering action and was very effective at making these holes in about 2 seconds flat. The hammer drill is almost scary to use because of how loud and powerful it is.
I started in the top right corner (of the drawing below) by attaching a 1×2 strip of wood to the wall and worked my way from left to right along the wall.. A 2×2 strip of wood pressed against the wall matched up with the line perfectly at one point, as did a 1×2 stacked on top of a 2×2. Those three points were the only easy ones, the rest of the framing (placed at 16 inch intervals) would have to be a piece of wood shimmed out to meet the line. For the shims I used cardboard drywall shims available in a big stack from Home Depot.
The cardboard shims are about 4 feet long and about 2 inches wide. I debated whether or not I should use the shims in front (as I believe they were intended) or in back of the wood. I ended up using them on the back of wood because in places they would be stacked up to an inch deep, and if the shims were on the front in such cases the short drywall screws I would be using would only be grabbing cardboard, not wood. In any case, the shimmed wood was very strong when it was sucked down to the wall with the concrete screws, even when it had a stack of cardboard shims applied to the back.
For the wall on the top of the image below I used 2×2’s to allow extra space for two electrical outlets that I would be installing, and the wall at the bottom only required 1×2’s. The other wall (on the left) was already framed out by whoever finished a portion of the basement, and I had already addressed the issues with the I-beam and I had lowered the ceiling to address the other issue on the top of that framed wall.
The next step before drywalling was to install and wire the electrical outlets.
2 Responses to “Office Space- Framing, part 2”
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January 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Nice blog Wayne! Great job with the diagrams. I look forward to following the progress.
Let me know if you want any mostly useless advice or just want to bounce ideas as I went through similar experiences over the last couple of years.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Thanks Mike! Yes, if you see anything that you would have done differently I would like you to post it in a comment!