Framing

Framing

Every finish in your house is only as straight as the frame behind it.

Cabinets that sit flat, doors that stay closed and tile that does not crack all start at the framing stage. Your walls go up square, plumb and level, with the studs crowned the same way so a wall reads flat when the drywall lands on it. Before anything gets covered, we block where your trim, your railings and your wall cabinets are going to land.

On our own builds this is the crew that frames the house and comes back to trim it. Other contractors and homeowners hire the same crew for the shell alone, put up properly, and then take it from there themselves. Either way the people standing on your deck are the people who stay from the foundation through the trim, and they work 100 miles out of Seekonk, with free estimates inside that radius.

Square now, or crooked forever

Framing is the last chance anybody has to make your house straight. Every trade that comes after inherits whatever gets left behind: the cabinet installer scribing a filler to a bowed wall, the tiler chasing a floor that falls half an inch across your bathroom, the door that has to be planed because the opening racked. None of them can fix it, they can only hide it. By the time you are looking at any of it, the framing is buried behind drywall and nobody is opening a wall back up to straighten it.

So the checking happens as the work goes up, not at the end. Plates snapped off a line, walls plumbed and braced before they are sheathed, the crowns on your joists all run the same way, openings headered to the span and checked for square with a tape across the diagonals. It is slower on the day and invisible afterwards, which is exactly why it gets skipped. You will never see the difference once the house is finished, which is the whole reason it matters who framed it.

How the job runs

1. Deck first, dead flat Everything above copies the floor system, so it gets levelled before a single wall goes up.
2. Layout on the deck Plates cut and marked together, so your openings land where the drawing says and not where the tape drifted.
3. Stand, plumb, brace Braced properly, not tacked, because a wall that moves after sheathing takes the whole corner with it.
4. Headers to the span Sized for what sits over them, with the right number of jacks under each end.
5. Sheathing nailed to schedule The nailing pattern is structure, not a formality, and it is what holds your building together in a storm.
6. Walked with a level Anything out gets fixed while it is still framing and still cheap, before the next trade builds on top of it.

What the job includes

• Floor systems, joists and subfloor
• Exterior and interior wall framing
• Roof framing, rafters and trusses
• Beams, headers and load bearing changes
• Blocking for cabinets, railings and fixtures
• Sheathing and weather barrier