With underlayment set it was time to frame!
My Dad was onsite for 2 weeks helping out, which enabled us to finish 4 (5 if you count the front as two separate) walls and raise them in one week, leaving another week for roof rafters and internal walls. The planning that went into framing paid off - we were able to cut every single member to designed length and screw everything together with minimal adjustment needed to keep everything square or within dimension. Those designed lengths were captured on these drawings:
240626-FRAME-ASY.PDF
Some details not captured on the drawings:
We cut the studs underneath the sills at 4 degrees sloping out from the inside - to create a slope on the sill as the windows will be installed with “drainage method” (leaving the underside intermittently sealed as to allow any water that gets behind the window to drain out)
The drawings were originally for a pre-fab steel stud design, which I pivoted away from and as you can tell from the photos, the design is build on-site wood. There is some blocking/horizontal members on the drawings that could exist in a steel stud design (they can be notched and intersected) but can’t exist in the wood frame
The two headers for the two 2x5 windows in the right hand wall don’t sit flush with the top plate - they are 3/8” below it on the drawing. We wound up using the headers as the top plate by moving them up 3/8” and lengthening all the members below them.
The front overhang for the office loft footwell is poorly designed in the drawings. More on that later.
The office loft floor design is somewhat bad - this was re-designed “in the field” - also more on that later
We wound up shifting the kitchen window up 3”
We edited the bathroom toilet nook header to allow more headroom in that space
After we fabbed all the walls on the ground, I recruited some hands to help raise them. The LH and RH walls were probably 1000-1200 lbs each. We first wheeled them horizontally into place, and then used a block and tackle mounted to a warehouse ceiling beam to raise them upright. We then lifted them into the dollies shown in the photos below. We had a total of 4 people manually moving the wall, and two people operating guy wires to keep it from tipping over. We then pushed the walls up a ramp onto the trailer and moved them the final foot or so into exact place with hand-power and mallet. We had some temporary “stantions” in place that we could pivot up and quickly screw into the wall to give it some diagonal support - 4x per long wall.
We then attached the frame to the trailer using tie down brackets and bolts - a detail of which can be found in the drawings. We started with the LH wall and then did the rear wall, RH wall, and then front lower wall.
Now what about the front top wall? I mentioned earlier that the overhang support was originally poorly designed (by me) - so I redesigned it and got it approved by my inspector. We then implemented the below design and it turned out pretty clean.
With all the exterior walls installed it was time to put the roof rafters on (we actually did the interior walls first but I’ll cover that in the next post). The roof has two angles - 1.5 degrees and 9.5 degrees. The shallow slope roof is reserved for the loft areas and is framed with 2x4s 12” on-center to allow for maximum headroom, while the steeper slope (LA Code requires >50% roof area is pitch 2:12 or greater) is 2x6s 24” on-center. The length of those rafters is captured in this drawing:
240708-ROOF-JOIST-TO-TOP-PLATE-DETAIL.PDF
We built a router jig to get the notch in the rafter perfect every time.
After installing some blocking between rafters, the exterior framing was complete save for the sub-fascias and barge boards on the end of the rafters.