Erecting Our Tiny House | Metal Stud Framing

Hey guys, it's Lindy and it's Mike here and this is T I Y the tiny yourself channel. And in today's video, we're going to show you a quick time-lapse of us assembling our walls as well as how we bolted them to our trailer. And just if you're curious about how we actually constructed them in our previous video, we went over all of our metal framing techniques. So you can check that out if you're interested. Yeah, that's cut by cut, how to logistically do everything. But then in this video, we're also going to talk about some of the structural decisions we made, like where to put an X, where to double up the beams, where to put a diagonal things like that. So stay tuned and watch us build our house. So this is a time-lapse of one of our larger walls. And what we like to do is cut all the pieces and then it just makes it easier for us to just attach them as is. And we do it in sections because it's such a large wall. We do one section at a time and then we flip that so that it's easier than having to flip a huge whole wall at once. And before we put the wall up, we're going to go over some things that we did to get our trailer ready for it. Very first step is to make sure that your sub floor is level all the way across. And we did that by using several jacks and blocks. So of course I have to level it forward, which for us meant using a couple of giant blocks there as well. And always be completely sure that your wheels are secure. As you can see in this time-lapse of us putting up our walls, while we're not Hercules, the studs are so light that it only took three people to maneuver all the walls onto our trailer, which is awesome. And in these next clips, you can see it freestanding. And we just did that by doing self-tapping screws before we ended up bolting our frame into our trailer. All right. We are screwing stuff in, which is really awkward and hard. And it constantly skips off. It's like polishing it. Okay. Can stop. All right. So I wanted to explain how we are going to anchor down our wall into the sub floor. And what we have here is a four inch galvanized carriage bolts, and it's going to be just going right into the wood on the bottom. And then it's going to connect to the metal on the top, except more like that. And one little trick we're using is this little guy here that prevents the carriage bolt from spinning. Even if the wood becomes a little bit compromised, just kind of digs in with its teeth there and prevents it from moving. And up here, we have a sort of fat washer so that it gets some really good surface area contact to the metal here. And then we have a lock washer so that it doesn't just spin out of control because this bolt is going to be inside the wall. So we won't be able to tighten it. And so that's how we're doing it. We're gonna do about 14 of those all the way around. We're going to do probably two in each corner, one in the middle there, two in each corner, and then another, you know, eight or so across the whole thing. All right. So now we have a three eighths inch hole for the three eighths inch bolt that goes all the way through and comes out the bottom of the stud. So I have another issue. This guy is basically all the way in on the bottom, but on the top here, you can see that I have basically no bolt to work with left. There should be at least, you know, about a half an inch there, but there's not. All right. So I decided that the easiest thing to do is actually just replace these nuts with lock nuts. They essentially just have a plastic piece on the inside that prevents them from spinning. This guy was just, just like too fat and I'd have to go back and get half an inch longer bolts. And that's just a pain in the neck. This way I can do all of these and come back anytime before the inside of the wall is finished and put those lock nuts on. All right. So I wanted to mention a quick upgrade. I'm doing these washers that I've been putting in have been pretty great. They feel super strong where they are, but I decided to go one step further and buy a sort of existing plate piece that they had at a store. And then I just ground it, cut it in half. And now I have four of these and I'm putting them in each corner because I think there'll be heck of a lot stronger. They're thicker and have more coverage. So I figured why not? All right. And there's the end result. As you can see, it's a lot more coverage than a little washer. All right. Right now we are just making the two halves of the roof. These are the rafters. And so once we get these two up, we will throw them on the roof and make a little Valley piece connecting them. And then we can actually put the roofing on. All right. You might notice that we are using two by four studs for our rafters. Normally people use two by six. So what's the deal with that? We actually only have two by fours at our local store and we just wanted to get going on the project. And so what we did is we did a load calculation and realized that if we double up every other one, then we can get all the support we need. And at first I did it the wrong way. And I kind of did it like this, like a four by four that creates a big insulation gap. And so we switched to putting them like this. So you can put insulation in the cracks. So this is the result, basically a big I beam. So right now what we're doing is making sure that this new piece we've added on is square because even when these ends are flush, the whole thing can kind of shift like a kind of parallelogram trapezoid situation. And so we have to measure the corners, you know, from that corner to that corner, and then from that corner to this corner and make sure that they're the same lengths so that it's square. So here's the current situation. It's a little boat out on the side. So we have a gap there and we're going to start by screwing in the edges and then moving out. And so the whole thing will be square. All right, right now I am assembling the middle Valley piece. And since this is the middle of everything, we're going to have two double up studs hitting each other, which will be cool. Have a little bit of extra support over here is the not yet finished side. So you can see what's going on there. And we didn't screw the second screw from the second rafter in yet so that the whole thing can just slide into the track on the existing roof pieces. And then we'll screw the entire thing together once it's all up there. All right, really quickly. I want to mention a couple of the structural techniques that we used to get this guy strong enough. The first one we used was on our overhang. We actually made a double bottom plate. Not only is that a double bottom plate, but one of them is a stronger gauge steel. Normally we're using 25 gauge steel and that's actually a 20 gauge steel on the bottom there. So that's stronger. And then these diagonal braces are really good at taking the pressure and moving it out to the edge. So if somebody was standing there working on the roof in the middle, you can see that the weight would kind of go out to the far corner and then be supported by the double beam and down there. And so that's the way I kind of like thinking about how these are designed. So even this little header here that I did, that I triangulated, you got to think of the middle weight being distributed out to the side and out to the beams and then downward. And so we also added an X here for extra stability because we didn't want any shifting at all there. And another triangulated piece there, again, moving from the corner down to this main post, which then goes straight down. And then on these edges here, we also did some diagonal pieces so that braking and acceleration wouldn't shift it when we're driving. And over the door, again, we have that header sort of truss beam and over all the windows, we did that as well. Now, one thing you may have noticed that we actually don't have a floor under here. This is gonna be our second loft, our TV loft. And under all of our lofts, we want to do an exposed wood thing instead of doing the metal and then capping it off and losing a lot of headspace. So we're actually just going to fill in wood there and then close it off. And over a wheel well, we also have a truss, but we are going to do a little bit more triangulation here, probably in that corner and again in that corner, but you can get an idea. And we're also going to be building in over the wheel well as well with studs. So stay tuned for that. All right, guys. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. It was really fun for us to finally see all of our work on the walls actually come together and look like the beginnings of a house. So that's really exciting for us. Yeah. It took us days to frame those walls. And the four walls went up in like 10 minutes. In fact, we finished it before our time-lapse was up. So it was super fast. And I also want to say that working with metal studs, other than the annoying screws is pretty amazing. We did a DIY scaffolding system and we're going to have a video about that. And we realized once again, how annoying it is to work with all that twisting, bending, warping wood. So I'm happy we did it this way and we got such a lighthouse now. So if you liked this video, please give a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already as well as check out our Instagram for more up-to-date progress, tiny it yourself, just like our channel name. Yeah. And we really appreciate you guys for watching. So come back. Bye. Really windy and scary. Who's afraid of heights? Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, Oh, that's it. Oh, that's yeah.