Framing A Wall Part 1 - Layout

In this video you'll learn all the steps to layout a wall.

Today we're going to frame a wall. We're going to layout the wall and frame it. We have our tools and our lumber ready to go. It's an 18ft wall. We got our speed square, hammer. Got some 16D nails for the wall and we got some concrete nails so that we can attach the wall to the concrete. Also, a line so we can strike a straight line and our saw. Got our level over here. 22x4s, 8 ft long. And, then we got three 12 footers right there.

We're ready to go inside and start working. You want to clean your area so you don't have any dust, little rocks or nails in the way. We're going to sweep this all up and then lay out our wall. We've squared up this section here by measuring both sides from the end. We're going to snap a line so we can follow this with our wall. We've got a nice red chalk line that we're going to line our wall up with.

Now, we're going to layout our wall. Grab a nail to hold this together. We have this perfectly square, perfectly flat. Then we're going to mark it in a minute, but put at least two in. If it's a long wall, put three in. I like to step on it. Hit it sideways. You're going to pull those nails out after you layout the wall. So laying out the wall, you need to mark 16 inches down the center. You want to go over to 32 inches. Then we are going to take our speed square and square this off. You line these up with your speed square. Mark it and put an X on the proper side. Go to the 32 and mark that with a big X. This is where you're going to put your 2x4. Split this and the 2x4 goes in between, right on these marks so then everything will be perfectly square. We're going to go all the way down this 2x4 and marking it like that. We have a door in this one, but you still need 16 inch centers for above the header. Alright so we're marking the rest of this with a good carpenter's tape measure will have a mark in red so you don't have to do any figuring in your head. Then we'll take a speed square and square it up. Before you start building your wall, take out the nails and then we're going to split this apart and go to the other end.