Mike: We’re building this year’s project house on a piering beam raised wood floor foundation. Huge southern pine glue laminated beams will support the areas where the heaviest loads fall. And pressure treated southern pine trusses will carry the weight elsewhere. Once the foundation is solid and set, and the sub floor is fully installed, the priming crew gets to work raising the exterior walls. The ground floor exterior walls are framed with pressure treated southern pine 2 by 6’s from Georgia Pacific. These solid sun studs had a greenish tint because the chemical used to treat the lumber is a new generation preservative from Chemical Specialties whose main ingredient is copper. It’s the copper that tints the wood green. The lumber in the foundation trusses which is treated with the same EPA approved compound. Cathy Kaake of the Southern Pine Council was our consultant in choosing the wood to frame the project house.
Cathy: We used pressure treated wood to help protect the home against fungal decay and termites. This gives an extra insurance to the homeowner for lifetime framing, meaning that that will be the less maintenance down the road for the homeowner. This, thus, add a little bit of cost up front but its worth it in the long run to provide framing that will last you a lifetime.
Mike: Working from the blueprints, the framers pop string lines to all the walls will be. This, slowly but surely, the frame of the house begins to take shape. Once all the ground floor, 2 by 4 and exterior walls have put up, and when the ground floor is fully framed, the crew begins building the foundation for the second floor using southern pine trusses and glue lined beams. These beams and trusses set 24 inches apart will support the weight of the entire 2nd floor and will create a very sturdy base for the sub floor.
Cathy: Southern pine is an ideal species for this. It’s very strong product. It’s a strongest lumber for engineering framing and application.
Mike: Throughout the interior of the house we will 2 by 4’s stud and these all came from Temple Land Line. Upstairs on the exterior we will back with 2 by 6’s stud and those came from Georgia Pacific. What they have in common is they’re southern pine and they’re also finger-jointed. Right here you can see the joints about 12 inches up you can see the next one. About every 12 to 18 inches you’ll see them. Now the reason they do that is because we’re using newer lumber. These are old growth trees they’re cutting down, these are new ones that are very easily renewable. And if you take a new tree, that stud is actually going to work a little bit and can cause drywall pops and cracks, things like that in your wall which we don’t want. So they actually take theses short sections, it could have been waste in the other circumstance and they put joints in them and they press them together and glue them together. Now we have a very strong stud that’s really smooth. Finger-jointed studs have other advantages too.
Cathy: One of the advantages is that you can cut them at the exact length that you need for your wall height. In this house, we used 10-foot walls. So we’ve precision and trimmed them to the specific length which means that there aren’t little blocks of wood left around lying on the job site. And that is an environmentally friendly thing to do.
Mike: The framing of the second floor is carried out just like the first. The crew cuts in frames of the wall on the ground then lift the walls to place. Once the walls are up, the crew brings in the trusses that will support the roof. These trusses were custom-built to fit the project house and each one is engineered to carry a specific load. When the trusses are in place, the crew anchors them to the frame with metal straps also know as hurricane straps. Strapping the roof to the frame ensures that the structure will hold together in high winds. For more information on finger-jointed studs and on framing your new house with termite and mold resistant lumber, contact the Southern Pine Council at southernpine.com.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services