Build a Closet - Beginning Construction of the Walls

Hi, I am Bill with BGB Builders. Our project today is building a closet. I am here with my wife and assistant Jena and we are going to show you how to layout our studs and our plates that are going to create the walls.

The first thing we are going to do is to cut our plates to the proper width. Now if you remember the width of the closet was 59 inches. Now I have cut my top and bottom plate three and half inches less than that, so I leave enough room for the other wall to tie into it, but I did leave the third plate at 59 inches. The third plate is at 59 inches and the first two are at fifty-five-and-a-half. The third plate is left along so that it will tie into the other wall.

Now let s go over laying out our door that we have gone in here. Now the first thing I want to do is find the center of the partition. Since its fifty-five-and-a-half, inches we are going to take half of that which is twenty-seven-and-three-quarters. Now this marks the center of our door and I am going to go ahead and mark that. I will put a C there for center.

Now the next thing we need to do is figure out how wide your door is going to be, I am going to use a two foot eight door which -- we have 32 inches, but I also need to leave two inches as rough opening so that the actual door will fit inside. So that leaves me 34 inches. So, if I take a half of 34 inches which is 17 on each side and I will do that again on this other side. Now that will give me the width of my door. So let s go ahead and mark those.

Now, I am going to go another inch and a half two times so that I can get a jack, which is what actually -- they call it a stud, there is a stud and there is a jack. The jack holds up the header of a door and another inch-and-a-half for the stud and I am going to mark those both with an X.

Now, the last thing that we needed is a stud on our outside. So I will just mark an inch-and-a-half in from the outside and put an X there as well and I will do the same on my other side. So, that will be to mark the jack and mark the stud and mark the outside.

We have got our bottom plate marked and the last thing you need to do is to transfer those marks to your top plate. So, I will line them up and this Speed Square is designed to be long enough for both plates. So you can go ahead and run your pencil all way through and do the same on the other side.

You don t need to mark the ultimate top plate being that the studs were already attached to this top plate and you don t need the marking for that. So last thing we are going to do before we are actually going to build our wall, is figure out the height of our studs.

So let s measure our floor to ceiling height of our room and that measurement is a 121. Now this is not the height of my studs, I still need to deduct off three times the width of these plates.

So I measure these plates, they are each an inch and a half deep so if I multiple that by three that will give four-and-a-half inches and if I take that off of my 121 inches that will give me 116 and half inches for my studs.

The next thing we are going to do is to layout our studs and actually construct the wall.