Hi, I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop.
Why is it although we all pretty much basically start with the same framing material as one another, when the first guy’s job’s done his wall is very straight and his countertops, shelving are nice and the other guy using an exactly the same material, his wall does this. Looks like the “Surf’s Up”. I’ll show you a few simple tips to be like the first guy. Let’s get to work.
There’s no such thing as a perfect board. Mother Nature made this board and basically it grew the way it grew. As you can see this board has a crown in it, this is what these guys are looking at when they’re looking down at the edge of the board. This board actually crowns this direction up, so to mark this crown, either make an arrow or turret mark or a curve that shows where direction this crown in going.
Here’s a few different ways of marking a crown, you can mark in anyway you want as long as you know which way the board is curving and you always point toward the outside curve of the board. Now on floor joist such as this, everyone knows that there are things that are going to be pointing down in the center of this floor joist. Gravity, furniture, the weight of the construction itself and your big uncle John that walks across the floor, every thing is going to be pressing down on this board. So everyone knows to put the crown up. But the common mistake that do-it-yourselfers make, is they don’t look at their wall studs and put any crown marks on their studs and people will say, “Why do I have to put crown marks in the wall studs?” I’ll show you.
Although every stud will have just a slightly different curve in it to the crown, you need to go through before you build any walls and you need to look at every single stud. Mark every single crown, now when you place these studs into the wall, the crown marks should always point the same direction. Well from one thing the reason you do that is if you put a crown this way on the first stud and then you put a crown that way on the second stud, although the top and the bottom are going to be straight because you snapped lines across your framing member, snapped line across your floor and you forced that wall plate to be straight, at the top and the bottom it’s going to line up. But in the center it’s going to wave like this back and forth slightly. Now you make those crowns opposite each other, if this is an 8-inch crown and this is ¼-inch crown, you make them opposite each other. All of a sudden you have a 3/8’s of an inch wave in your wall in 32 inches. You don’t want that to happen.
Now, the question is, is which side should you put your crown to. If you’re building an outside wall, whether it gets plywood or whether it’s up in a basement and it’s against the foundation wall, you always put your crowns out, so that the crown is facing toward the outside or facing toward the concrete. Why do you do this? It’s simple. I consider it an active and an inactive side of the wall. You always place your crown facing the inactive side of the wall, obviously the outside, there’s nothing happening out there toward the concrete there’s nothing happening out there. What could be happening on the inside? Cabinets, counter tops, things along those lines, when you have a wall that has a curve in it like this that is convex and you, I know that’s dramatic. Can you see that? But when you put a cabinet on this wall, the closer you get to the top, the straight or this wall’s going to be, so when you screw the top of this cabinet on up here, it’s in a straighter area and then it’s very easy to take shims and shim the bottom away. Same thing with the base cabinet, when you put the base cabinet in, it’ll be a little bit of a way at the top and tight at the bottom, it’s easy to shim this in. Now because these are all curved the same direction, when your countertop goes down it or your backsplash goes down it, you have a nice even flat surface that will go down. There’s one situation where I would not put the crowns in the same direction, I’ll show you what that is.
There are certain parts of wall framing that you would like to be as straight as possible. Along side of doorways, obviously that door jam is going to cut nice and straight you want it to fit nicely in the wall. Usually in these places where walls butt up to each other or where there’s going to be a door jam, you have more than one piece of framing going together like this. So what I always do is I take the crowns, I make them opposite each other like they are showing right here, I put them together like this, I nail the top, I nail the bottom. What that does is that it’ll leaves a little bit of extra here, a little of extra on this side. Then you take 16 penny nails and you drive them into an angle, forcing them to be straight with each other so that the crowns are pulling against each other hence straightening these two by member which makes it better for an outside corner so your corner bids are nice and straight or for a door where you’re going to have a door that’s going to be hanging nice and straight down that opening. So that’s it, it’s a simple tip but we all start with the same material, you might as well go ahead and get the best product out of it that you can.
Now on that note if you’re going down through in your crown and two by fours and you find one that looks like you could make a ski pole out of it, set that dude aside and use that for blocking the whole plates or the small little recesses in the walls, don’t use that as a wall stud. Pick your standard, a typical curvature on an 8 foot stud is may be anywhere between and 8th to the most a quarter. Anything beyond that you want to either set is aside and send it back to the lumber yard. A lot of times it’ll take to severely curved studs back or use it in another part of you product where you need shorter studs where that curve won’t make a difference.
I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. I hope you appreciated this tip. If you like our videos please subscribe, if this isn’t interesting to you, check out our home channel, we have many other videos there. Thanks.
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