I'm just finishing the demolition phase of a minor remodeling project in my basement, removing about 8 feet of wall installed by a previous homeowner. This project teaches a lesson:
How NOT to Build a Wall, in Ten Easy Steps
Install the studs at random intervals.
Don't bother securing the bottom plate to the floor. If you cut a few of the studs just a bit long, and force-fit them, friction will keep the bottom plate in place.
Don't bother nailing those studs in place. Friction, remember?
Attach remaining studs to plates with six-penny box nails.
Use eight at each end because they're so small.
It's OK to use untreated lumber for the bottom plate. Water seepage won't harm fir, will it?
Use regular sheetrock for the entire wall. Water seepage won't harm that either, will it?
The doorpost doesn't need to be attached to the bottom plate. The sheetrock will keep it from moving.
Nail the sheetrock every 3 inches along each vertical edge.
That gives you enough nails that you don't need to nail it anywhere else.
And don't _even_ get me started on the electrical code violations I found inside that wall...
Why, oh why, do people with no knowledge or experience of the building trades imagine that they are competent to do their own construction?
Been there done that. Previous owner left behind several mason jars full of mixed screws, seemed odd. Then I started removing stuff that he had built and need eight different bits to take them apart, what a pain in the backside, can't even imagine wanting to build something that way.
Last two or three pieces of his handiwork that I have removed, recip saw, hell with the mess, it is less frustrating.
Someday, maybe I'll post pictures of some of the electrical outlets in my house. Some are just crooked. In several places, the box itself sticks out
1/4" on one side, so the plates don't fit flush. I asked the previous owner about that when I moved in. He said the boxes stuck out "because of the lath".
Huh? I installed new boxes in plaster/lath walls in my previous house. There's no reason for them to look like they're trying to escape the wall.
Well, look at the bright side. The obvious lack of fasteners must have made the demolition job easier.
My last house was full of surprises like this. They obviously thought it was OK. Anything goes. No sense of pride. Total garbage work.
I broke up some concrete in the back yard to expand the garage. Instead of rebar in the concrete, I found parts of an old refrigerator and bread trays from a bakery. Whatever was laying around got used.
A house, 3 doors down from mine, had the entire family room wired with those cheapo 18ga extension cords. They were held in place between the block foundation and the 2x3 studs which were concrete nailed in place. No insulation, no vapour barrier. The studs were then covered with hardboard panelling, no drywall. I have built theatre sets (flats) with more integrity.
It's not just building. It's lots of thing. I laugh when I see Lowe's or HD run ads that make some seriously complicated improvements look like any Harriet Homeowner (remember Hechingers?) could do them with a hammer and a screwdriver.
Way back when I did a lot of PC tech support for neighbors and friends I saw some pretty savage things people had done trying to do their own upgrades.
Someone I know had read an article about easy it was to install your own hard disk. This was the age of the ATA66 and 100 hard disk cable standard. While Western Digital's big fold out instructions did make it look easy, it really only covered about 80% of what you might find "under the hood." IOW, it covered only the most basic installations.
By the time I got to the machine, I could find no earthly reason why it would even boot up, but it did. After about 5 minutes. (She had put up with that for five months before calling me!!) She had two *slaves* on one channel, with the right DIP settings, and a master and a slave (CD as master!) on the other channel, with the wrong DIP setting. Drive operations between channels worked, drive operations on the same channel did not.
I should have known right then to walk away. SHE was getting mad at ME for Western Digital not "being honest with her" about how easy it was. I told her they were also forgetting to teach her all about cable types, termination, DIP switch settings, Berg clips, Molex connectors, hard drive capacity limitations, boot sectors, basic electrical theory, why using WD's magic partitioning software was NOT a good idea, how her drive letters would change because of how MicroSoft lays logical volumes, the difference between physical drives and logical drives, the concept of Master and Slave drives (NO RACE COMPLAINTS, PLEASE! ), how important it was to back up ALL her drives before working on even a new one, how to check her work, etc.
In short, WD has failed to teach her how to do nearly everything that ten years of experience makes it seem easy. There was never any admission she was in over her head. This was someone else's fault. She did not know all the things she needed to know and did not even KNOW how deficient her knowledge was!
Putting up a wall must seem the same to some people. At one time, in real life or on TV, they see some master carpenter put up a wall and it looks SO easy. They know they can make all those same motions so off they go, never even bothering to check out a Time-Life book from the library (old world) or Google it on line (new world).
The most obvious giveaway of an amateur wall builder, IMHO, is studs NOT placed on 16" centers, even though most measuring types have specific marks for 16" centers. Next is lack of vertical plumbness. Third is that cluster f_ck of nails that Doug describes in list item 5 that are placed to assure the lowest strength joint possible.
I will have to admit, the first walls I put up at age 16 had their flaws, but they WERE on 16" centers!
Yeah, well, you should see the sheetrock taping job a presumably professional builder did in my closet. It's diagonal, not at a right angle to fit against where the wall and ceiling meet.
The first time I used tape it wasn't perfect but it was a hundred times better.
Roger that. Here in Tucson, I've found that it almost always requires 2 tries for people to get anything right. When I do things myself, I may sometimes have to re-do something, but I'm not claiming to be a professional at that particular task.
What shocks me and is a common practice is to install interior door jams with no nails in the jam. Staples in the jam moldings hold it all in place. They don't need no stinkin shims.
Thats common practice on most new homes today. The rough openings are very tight and they nail right to it then hold it together with the casement trim. I still do it the old fashion way. shim shim shim...
I've seen people in the building trades do amazingly bad things, and they apparently knew they were doing it. Your wall builder is just an idiot. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to learn the correct way to build a wall, simple house wiring, basic plumbing and so on.
What I really detest is someone, like my kid, saying "I can't do that, I don't know how or I never did that" My answer is always one of two things, WTF, do you think I was born knowing how, or, damn, I never did it either, I guess we're screwed...
I guess if you are born into a family that pays someone else to do everything, do nothing but go to school all your life, have no friends in the trades or that actually work with their hands, your on your own, and a little initiative can get you in trouble.
I have a theory that the internet is behind the pathetic trend toward helplessness. I wonder how many youngsters consider going to the library for a book to help them with a project they've never attempted. Does anyone even notice that there are shelves full of books as you walk into Home Depot or Lowe's?
Reading a book shouldn't necessarily be that much different from viewing the same information on a web page, but for some reason, I think it is. Maybe all the animated ads are too much of a distraction from the important content. I don't know....
If you've got a good library then it's a good resource. But it doesn't take much effort to exhaust most libraries. Searching my local library's catalog on "table saw" gets "Collected Poems of Constantine Cavafy", "Weeds, Season 4", "Under Town", "Boone: A Biography", and "Verses [of Ogden Nash] from 1929 On".
"Carpentry" found a bunch of childrens' books, a few on trim and finish carpentry, and four that might be decent--they've been out of print so long that Amazon doesn't even have a picture of them so I can't tell for sure. Their holdings on that topic are so meager that I'm tempted to cart some of the books that I'm done with down and donate them.
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