Step by Step Today, we're going to build what most homes need - and that's a bigger utility room. This room is very narrow, room enough for the washer and dryer. They'd like to put their freezer and their cat's litter box in here, but when you open both doors, if you look at the swing of them, there's not enough room in here for anything. So we're actually going to extend the utility room out into the garage. We've got plenty of room out here. I've got approximately a six-foot by six-foot area. Plenty of room, and all we need to do is actually just build a wall off this corner and take it straight across. Now, it sounds like a big project, but it's really not that difficult to do, and this is something that you ought to be able to do today after watching the show. First thing is to measure our base. We need six feet that way. Let's see how tall our wall needs to be - 111 and a quarter. So we're ready to start cutting some wood and get started. The measurement of our wall was 111 and a quarter, but we're not going to cut our stud that long. The reason for that is we're going to have a piece underneath it that's called our baseplate, and a piece above it that's called our top plate. And these are one and a half inches thick. This is a 2x4, but a 2x4 is not two inches by four inches. It's one and a half inches thick and three and a half inches wide. Since we have one on top and one on bottom, we subtract three inches. Instead of 111 and a quarter, we're going to drop down to 108 and a quarter. Use a square to mark that, and we're ready to cut. A circular saw as well as a tape measure, a framing square and a pencil are some of the basic tools you'll need for this framing project. Later on, you'll also need a hammer and a drill. The first part that we nail together is the header, which is the piece that goes above the door. The 2x4 studs are three and a half inches wide, so the header needs to be the same width. They're one and a half inch thick, so we need two 2x4 studs and another half inch. We've taken a piece of wallboard that's half an inch thick, cut that, and we just lay it in between. Since this is not a load-bearing wall, it doesn't have to be really strong; it just has to be the right width. We square that up, and we're ready to nail it together. Now we're ready to start nailing studs. When we do the first one here on the end, one thing that you ought to do is dull the end of your nail. That way you won't risk splitting the board. Sharp nails split the board a lot. Just tap it a couple of times, and that'll round the edge a little bit. You will want to begin nailing the studs together around the outside perimeter of the wall frame, anywhere there's a stud intersecting the top or bottom plate. Once that's all firmly nailed in place, you can begin nailing the interior pieces - like the door trimmers and the cripple where it meets the header. Before we stand up our wall, we need to do a little work to make it look like it was built there originally, and it's not something we added on later. It needs to be smooth with this wall, but this room also needs to be square. To make sure that it's square, we're going to pull back from the corners. We start here on the edge and measure over 5/8 of an inch because we're going to be putting wallboard on that's 5/8 of an inch thick. That's for the fire code. We measure from the corner and hit our mark. We see that we're at 59 and 3/4 inches. Now we want to pull the same distance from this corner over here. 59 and 3/4, that's the exterior of our wood frame. I'm going to go find some help to stand up the wall, and when we get back, we'll also put on the wallboard and install the door.
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