shadesofmauve | My wall, let me show you it!

I haven't been commenting because of overwhelmitude on my end, but I LOVE watching this and love that you're doing all this hard work and OMG.

*hugs*

Stasia

:D I'm so glad! I'm never sure how understandable it is over the net, and sometimes it feels really slow, but it's coming!

Also, the last few weeks it's really felt like dad did all the hard work -- but this evening I loaded in 26 sheets of drywall, so I no longer feel so guilty. It's inconveniently packaged in pairs, which puts 2 half-inch sheets at roughly 90 pounds, since I think I got the 'ultra light' stuff, and the 5/8 well over a hundred. Not that I was moving it by myself, obviously -- at the hardware store I went up to a guy in an orange apron and said "Excuse me, where do I get a brute to help me load drywall?" And he said "I'm the brute!" :P He and I loaded it onto the car, and then into my friend's truck. Once we got it home Xed and Erik helped a LOT -- Nancy and I pulled/pushed it out of the truck, and the guys actually lifted it. Still, that means I did my half of that weight twice, and maybe a quarter of it a third time.

I'm really wishing i hadn't let myself slack off on my little weight program this summer.

I bet you've heard a phrase like this regarding art before:

Hey, you're really good at construction! You should come over and remodel our house when you're done with yours!*

* knowing full well that you'll never be truly done with yours, because you own it and that's how it goes, so it's OK to say this and kind of get away with it as some sort of sick joke.

LOL.

Of course, among people I know, especially my dad's circle, helping friends with remodeling really is the great and recurring gift. But it tends to be a goes-around-comes-around sort of thing. :P

What I'm ACTUALLY planning on doing, once this part of my house is done, is having a bunch of working-with-friends studio days. I won't be able to fit a ton of people, but I figure I can have 1 - 3 guests at a time, makin' stuff! I hope that includes you, at some point. :)

It's going to be awesome! :)

:D

It looks great, but I'm a little confused: you're taking out the wall behind the new stud wall - the one with the door in it? What're you putting up in its place, glu-lam or something? Or is it less load-bearing than it looks? (It looks like it's carrying the roof joists, but my vision is pretty fucked right now. XD )

It's not load bearing. The house is small enough that it would technically be fine without anything under the trusses for the whole span (it's only 27 feet), but as it happens the new wall we put in will actually do a better job of supporting the trusses than the old one did, just because it's closer to center-of-span.

I don't think it's your vision in this case, I think it's just that you can't see the rest of the house to get an idea of weight and scale.

EDIT to add: In point of fact, since installing the new wall, my roof line is actually *straighter* than it was before. :P

Edited 2013-10-24 17:23 (UTC)

I meant the diagonal beams holding up the roof, not the horizontal beams. But your answer tells me that yes, it is my perception and they go to the back wall, which must be closer than I thought.

Also, yay new straighter roof! Murksouth's roof needs some work like that when I get it redone. :-p

It really does look good, btw. Exciting! Construction is fun as long as I don't have to haul the wallboard. :D

Construction is fun as long as I don't have to haul the wallboard. :D

Funny you bring that up. Last night we moved in 26 sheets. :P Thankfully Xed and my sweety were waiting at home, so I didn't have to unload them all -- just load them at the store, twice. I am *absolutely* getting brawnier help for actually putting it up, and renting a hoist.

Now that I know what you meant, I can see how it looks like diagonals are coming down right there. They're not, quite, but it's hard to tell in the photograph. They're just bracing members for the trusses, and they actually don't even come down in the same place from truss to truss. That's apparently what you get when they hand-build trusses on-site and don't really care that much. It made plumbing the gas line extra special.

The roof-straightening is really cool -- just the fact that you can so easily move THAT MUCH with a little jack. And of course it makes excitingly terrifying noises as everything shifts around. :P

Oh, and the back wall is about 6 feet past the interior wall. Quite small spaces. :)

Minor peculiarity from where I live...

There are no cross pieces between the studs in that new wall - Kiwis call them dwangs, I believe poms call them noggins - which looks odd to my eyes. I'm used to seeing three dwangs in a wall like that, evenly spaced. And if, as you say, that is a load bearing wall it would also have a diagonal steel brace set in it as well to add rigidity to the structure.

There was an article I saw recently, but can't find due to poor google-fu, which reported on some tests that were done on school buildings where they put a pair of trucks, one each side, to the task of tearing the building apart. It required about 3 times the force of the Christchurch quakes (which had ground acceleration of 2.2G) to structurally damage the building, IIRC. We build 'em strong down here...

Wow, you do indeed!

It's not precisely a load-bearing wall. That is, it's definitely bearing *some* load -- evidently, since it helped straighten the roof :P -- but it's not required for the house to be structurally sound. It's not structural.

I googled dwang, and I've never seen a wall built like that before! I've seen blocking between studs, but it's nowhere near as regular -- I think it's usually put in places where you may want to anchor cabinets or something later, or if you have to attach a strange piece of sheathing. It also shows up in really tall walls.

Now, both the exterior sheathing and the interior drywall have to meet structural code requirements -- that's the protection against sheer forces. And new houses built in this part of the country often have exterior and structural walls reinforced with metal straps, though smaller than the ones you describe.

Now, big commercial and public buildings, like the school you describe -- there I've seen the big diagonals, especially in steel stud construction.

The steel strapping put in walls (that I've seen) is generally 3 or 4mm thick L shaped about 1inch on each leg with frequent nail holes to facilitate fixing to studs and dwangs. the strapping is usually inset into the timber to present a flat surface for the cladding, be it gib on the interior or planking on the exterior.

Also here in Wellington the norm seems to be three dwangs for an 8foot/2.4m stud. I haven't actually seen a stripped house anywhere else in NZ, and grew up Adelaide where everything is brick or concrete block, so I have limited experience to talk authoritatively on the matter.

I may put up a couple of photos of our kitchen sans gib (aka drywall, I think) on FB if I remember & can find them...

That'd be fun!

And gib is drywall, or basically drywall -- I checked last time it came up. We also call it sheetrock, but that's actually a brand.

I *think* the earthquake straps we put in my folks' house were Ls *inside* the wall, not flat Ls set-in like yours, but it's been 15 years and I really don't remember. Their house is considerably bigger than mine, and has a second story, so some of the requirements are stricter. Also, I'm not changing enough for them to require me to upgrade everything, so what's there is still meeting 1960's standards, not current ones! Dad and I joked that in a bad enough quake, the new wall we built where the garage door used to be is the only thing that WON'T fall down. :P

My old house (in Seattle, a little over 100 years old) had lots of those. Not as many as you seem to have, but there's at least one between each wall stud on each floor, at least on outside walls.

These days tho' it's all earthquake strapping instead.

I think they were more common with balloon built houses, too -- a little extra rigidity and a draft-and-fire break in those loooong cavities.

I can't remember for sure whether my folks' 1933 house had any in walls we demolished... but that's not very indicative of anything, since it was built by a guy who was clearly cutting corners! (There was a 'header' that didn't actually go all the way across a door, for one thing).

My wall, let me show you it!

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