Back to the House

The layout of the floor joists governs where everything else in the house is placed.  Properly constructed, the floor joists will be directly under the wall studs, the wall studs directly under the 2nd floor joists, the 2nd floor joists directly under the 2nd floor wall studs, and the wall studs will be directly under the roof rafters.  Each load carrying member is exactly in line with the ones above and below.

We start on the corner that has the longest 2 walls in the house.  That way, the bulk of the house is precisely accurate and any propagation errors are minimized by the time we get to the shorter walls.  The floor joist locations are marked on the rim board (shown) and/or sill plates.  We layout the joists so there are exactly 16" between the center of each joist.  However, the first joist from the end of the house is placed back 1/2 of the width of the joist to insure that our floor decking will seam on the middle of a joist.

The TJI floor joists are a bit tricky to cut accurately with a circular saw because of the recessed center.  A framing square and small hand clamp make a great jig to guide the saw.  The square clamps exactly 5" back from the cut line for this Porter Cable framing saw so you can always just measure your lengths 5" short.  It makes for a perfect cut - every time!

Melanie uses a string line to bring the line of the front of the house across the open space of the turret.  It would be tough to find the location of this joist without this simple tool that has been used since the dawn of civilization (it was certainly used for the construction the Pyramids in Egypt).

Mel loads nails into this somewhat newer tool - a pneumatic nail gun.  The nail gun shaves 8 to 15 seconds off the time it takes to setup and drive each nail.  She is using it to drive 10d nails for the joists and 8d ring shank nails for the floor decking.  This Porter Cable is one of the lightest on the market, but doesn't have the reputation for durability like a Senco or an Hitachi.  We'll see how it holds up by the time we get to the roof . . .

The floor joists are complete and Mel is checking out the special blocking and stiffening requirements for the TJIs.

The floor decking is next . . .