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FRAMING

FRAMING COURSE: LARRY HAUN, "THE VERY EFFICIENT CARPENTER"

This is the best framing class there is. Every framer on our jobs should watch all of it. Larry Haun and his brother Joe frame a real one-story, three-bedroom, 1,600 square foot house from the sills to the roof sheathing, and the camera is over their shoulder for every cut and every nail. The two of them, plus a helper, normally frame a house like this in one week. The course shows you why. Every step is planned so nobody walks twice, measures twice or handles a board twice: lay out on the deck, cut all the parts at once, nail flat and stand it up.

It is three parts and runs 3 hours: floors, walls and roofs, in the order you build them. The tools are from 1992, but the layout, the cut order and the way they move are exactly how a fast, square, plumb house still gets framed today. If you only watch one framing video, watch this one. Then watch it again before your next roof.

Watch in this order (full series: The Very Efficient Carpenter, all 3 parts):

1. Framing Floors and Stairs (1 hour 0 minutes): Site layout, squaring the building with diagonals, sills, posts and girders, joists at 16 inches on center, rim joist, subfloor, then a full set of stairs: riser and tread math, stringer layout and cutting.
2. Framing Walls (1 hour 8 minutes): Chalk-line wall layout on the deck, detailing plates, headers, king studs, trimmers and cripples, using a story pole, nailing walls together flat, raising exterior and interior walls, tying them together at the laps, then plumbing and lining.
3. Framing Roofs (52 minutes): Ceiling joists at 16 inches on center, crowning and gang-cutting rafters with ridge cuts and seat cuts, setting the ridge, nailing off rafters, blocking, gable studs with a 14-inch vent opening, sheathing, and joining two gable roofs with a valley.

Extra Larry Haun lessons:

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