Framing a Wall in Sketch UP | Free Online 3D Modeling Tool

hello welcome back to the channel and today's video is going to be a sketchup tutorial on how to create a dimensionally accurate 2x4 stud wall [Music] okay so um the idea behind this video is you have i'm gonna pull up some images an actual wall where you need to model utilities going through it like piping or electrical or anything like that where you're designing and you need to be accurate dimensionally you have this kind of sandwich of half inch drywall your 2x4 studs and then half inch drywall as well that's what you can kind of see on the left here and you can see this open wall on the right and this is what you would need to show if you were planning things like electrical box locations for either switches or outlets ensuring that there was an overlap in between rooms things like that so we're going to take a look at how to do that in sketchup today and i'm going to start with a floor plan of just 10 foot by 10 foot it doesn't really matter it doesn't really matter what you make the floor plan as long as you keep in mind let's see that looks really small is this 10 inches nope 10 feet okay so it doesn't really matter but the thing to note is if you're going to add studs to this space but you took measurements inside a room then you want to start building it out towards you so let's say you had a room where it was actually inside the walls inside finished drywall was 10 feet by 10 feet and you wanted to model the uh the room beyond that well it's important to note i'm going to use just this wall but you can use whatever wall you need it's important to note that when you have finished drywall what you actually have is a 10 foot by one half let me make sure i got the units correct there 10 foot by half an inch sheet of drywall that's standard there is thicker drywall but that's pretty normal for inside of a house inside of a room and then you have a 10 foot by three and a half inch stud and then on the other side assuming the other side is getting finished as well you have another sheet of 10 foot by half inch drywall okay and you may have noticed when i put in the stud which 2x4 right that's the normal stud that gets used in interior um in in inside walls especially non-load-bearing walls you'll get a two by four well um it's important to be familiar with the fact that those are actually one and a half by three and a half inches dimensionally because they get carved down from like raw two by four so if you're working in a house that's a hundred years old maybe you have actual true two by fours but anytime you're putting in modern studs and it's two by four walls it's actually an inch and a half by three and a half you can google that i'm not lying to you but okay so this kind of drywall sandwich which again going back to the images is what you have here that's what almost every interior wall has is half inch drywall uh three and a half inches of wood and then another half inch drywall and so we're gonna start bringing this into three dimensions we're gonna ignore the drywall for now i just wanted it to be there to be clear that like you do if you're trying to get down to half inch sizing analysis to make sure things are going to fit wiring runs piping anything like that be sure to include the drywall because it's there so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to grab my extrude tool the little arrow pulling out of a rectangle because right now we just have this flat sheet of our 10 by 10 room and then one of the walls and another thing to keep in mind if your room is 10 by 10 and you want to model all four walls you actually are probably going to want to extend these past the edges but we're just going to do one wall for now but right because it's going to be three and a half inches well it's actually four and a half inches once you add the drywall in all directions so you would actually want it to be 10 feet plus four and a half inches on either side i might do that in a future video this one's going to be long enough as is so this is your base plate it's the bottom 2x4 that runs along the floor and most of the time framers are actually building walls on the ground and then standing it up and so that's why they would build it with a base plate and a top plate but that's a long way of saying we're going to pull this up and we're going to pull it up one and a half inches so like we talked about that's the size of a 2x4 and you can kind of see if you've dealt with two by fours before this clearly looks like one you may notice when you extrude stuff that the back side of it can become empty and the way you fix that is just grab your pencil tool and any one line of the hollowed-out shape just draw that line again and it'll become solid okay so now we have a two by four just sitting on the floor where it would actually go and we're going to start putting in our vertical beams so let's say you have a nine foot ceiling height which is two finished ceiling that's a pretty high room but that's still fairly standard let's just go to the corner where it sits on the floor because that's not gonna be nine feet from your base plate that's going to be nine feet from your floor and we're just going to start drawing a line up just to get our our dimensions our size incorrect and let's go nine feet okay so now we have an arrow uh now we have a line that's up nine feet and i'm gonna put one on the other side as well in the same kind of position and that's just gonna kind of orient us in the room so you can see this is how high our two by four wall is gonna go and so i'm gonna connect those two and then i'm going to delete out the screen that it kind of tries to make but this should sort of show you the general idea of how the outline of our wall is going to look so let's start dropping in two by fours to bring it into the ceiling bring it bring them up vertical so this is going to be 3.5 inches and then 1.5 inches and you can just drag until you get that correct i think it's way easier to do 3.5 and then the quotation mark and then 1.5 and then the quotation mark and that'll give you oops that'll give you a 2x4 come on well i said it was easy and then i'm struggling but 3.5 comma 1.5 and then you should just be able to i don't know why it keeps overwriting it that should be all you have to do okay and delete all right so there we go we actually get it's supposed to be pretty easy any time you um drop anything that's on like a finished rectangle so here we made this enclosure with the top um i'll actually get rid of that top so it doesn't happen every time i make a two by four because that's that's gonna try to close off the space um like we talked about so then i'm gonna just drop them on the sides for now and this will also be 3.5 and 1.5 and let's get our outer two studs uh raised up so you are always going to have a stud on the or you should always have a stud on the extremities of your wall on the far left and far right it's pretty hard to um finish drywall if they don't have a solid surface at the ends to anchor to so you grab your extrude tool again you pull them up to the nine feet which this is where making those nine foot high lines is really nice because we have a finish point to extrude them up to and just a little cleanup thing as you're going you probably will want to go to where you extruded and just draw horizontal lines across your model especially if you're trying to show like individual studs where they'll start where they're where they'll end because a lot of the times you can use a model like this as well for determining how much total material you have to go and get so that's just my spiel there but uh yeah so now we have okay the outer two studs and that looks pretty good let's do one um stud on the top so just like we have this bottom plate let's do a top plate but let's do it a little bit differently um let's take right here i'm just trying to show all the different ways that you could model in a stud so let's say you wanted to start at the very end and just go vertically 1.5 inches and then you want to come across to right here and actually you can see it's snapping it's got from point it's got the lengths in the bottom right over here and so you can see it just made it just made the end of a stud and so we'll grab that rectangle just like we have every time so far and we're going to drag it all the way to this end point and it'll just snap in place and so that was probably the fastest stud we've made yet we check that we don't need to backfill and make sure it looks good but just zooming out we have this rectangle of our stud wall already going and now snapping in the rest is going to be pretty quick i'll show you how there's this thing in framing it's um it's called on center and all that means is like it should be a 16 16 is the most uh typical that i've seen for interior walls is 16 inches on center for your stud walls there are some materials where it's actually allowable you can go up to like 24 some people will overdo it and do 12. some exterior walls different areas code is different but 16 inches is pretty normal they say on center it's exactly the same thing conceptually as on right edge on left edge it doesn't matter it just means if you are at the middle of a stud and you go 16 inches you should be at the middle of another stud so that's that's me being long-winded but for this first one since we're on the right edge of a stud i'm going to take a line from that midpoint make sure i'm going at a right angle but i'm going to go 14 and a half inches for this first one because just like we talked about right a stud is one and a half inches wide and right now i'm just marking where all of them should start so i'm going to go 14 and a half inches and then from there on i'm going to go 16 inches and every time i finish a line i'm going to go up and down and then i'm going to go back at the very end and clear out these well i guess i'm doing it right now and i'm going to clear out those marking lines so this is just kind of my like cheat for doing quick measurement i just will put down a line and i'll make it however long i need it to be so for studs it's 16 inches and then i just mark it vertically i kind of make the crossing line and then i delete out those lines i use to mark it so i'm going down this model and just every 16 inches putting a marker in and what you'll see is uh you're never typically never going to be 16 inches from both ends unless it just worked out really nicely that you have a room where you know it's some multiple of a foot and a half or a foot and a third whatever where it's some nice multiple of 16. so you can see right here all these gaps are even until you get to the very end we're a little close to the right you could use that concept to to design something that's not that way but i'm just gonna leave it so so 3.5 1.5 and it's very normal that you're going to have um 3.5 1.5 for all these it's very normal that you're going to have a not 16 inch gap on both sides it's better to leave that gap uneven than to make your studs some unusual spacing like you could say oh well if i would cut all of the spacing down to 14 inches i would get an even 14 inch gap here too that's kind of incorrect because you want your studs to be spaced at a standard sizing i probably will have some diy in my comments like i do even spacing all the time i don't care so we're going and we're dropping in the footprint of our uh two by fours and then once they're all modeled in here we're just gonna grab that extrude tool and this part's really satisfying we just grab them we pull them up to the bottom edge of our top plate which is why we made that early and we're going to do that for each of them and it only takes you know a couple seconds and you'll see like sketchup loves to snap to things that make sense to it so it'll give you oops ctrl z you can always control z to undo just like you can with the word doc or any other thing um and uh sketchup will usually snap to exactly what you need to get to so there we go all right and um that's pretty cool uh one thing that we do have is we have to just come down and put a horizontal line in across those studs you could do them all individually it's way faster do it this way and just delete out the panels that it tries to put in and now like we were talking before you can see all the individual studs we'll come over and do it for the other side too and uh if you're a builder just starting to get into 3d modeling this probably looks very familiar to you if you've never seen an open wall and you're just kind of getting into like interior design or planning then this is maybe new to you but this is pretty much what a wall looks like when it gets framed in and lifted up so let's say that there's a door going in this wall because every room is going to have at least a door and if you can do this process for the door you can do any window as well it's it's very similar just a little bit easier in my opinion so let's say for door placement you were just instructed put it in the exact center of the room and let's say it's a 32 by 80 door which is a pretty standard interior door okay so we're gonna just make a line that's five feet just so we have a midpoint reference and i'm going to use my little cheat markers to say okay that's the midpoint you probably already had in this model excuse me in this model a midpoint marker if you had gone with like this line from the drywall that we put in but that's okay we made a new one now i said it was going to be a 32 by 80 door here's where having some knowledge of houses is important when you do a rough opening which means you're framing in a wall you actually want to add two inches to both dimensions for your rough opening so 32 by 80 you're actually gonna make an opening with your two by fours that is 34 by 82 and that's so that you have um space for the trim like the the door that gets hung on its hinges and then put in frames that uh stop it and have the little spot for the the um latch that takes up an average of two inches and whoever's hanging your door is gonna give you like okay well it's a 30 by 32 by 80 door and um a real framing person who knows what they're doing is going to add two inches to both of those for the rough opening so there's my spiel about doors um but let's go ahead and say from that mid point that we made that means we're going to add 17 inches to either side for a rough opening and then we're going to mark those edges and then we're going to clean up everything in the middle so we don't need these anymore not really and i'm going to put in the new studs before i uh before i remove the old ones to show you what we're doing so the um right at the limits of where your door is gonna go and i'll go ahead and put my stud rectangles in here right wherever your door is going to go you're going to have two by fours to the left and to the right of the rough opening that's what they're going to get mounted to but you don't always bring these all the way to the ceiling they're actually called jack studs and you house people on the internet can check my terminology but they just go to the height of the door so if you think about this the rough opening is supposed to be 82 inches from the ground it's sitting on a bottom plate that takes an inch and a half of that so the height is actually going to be 80 and a half inches from the top of your plate so i'll extrude those real quick at 80.5 and then i'll talk about what we did i'm gonna clean these up just like always okay and if we zoom out what you're gonna notice if i grab my measuring tape is that from the floor to the stud that we just dropped in okay um it is six foot ten and that's 82 inches let me make sure 72 82 yeah 82 inches okay so that means that we made these studs at the right height for the door opening and the reason you need these to not go all the way up to the ceiling is this also changes whether or not structural i should probably put like a disclaimer in here like i'm not going to act as your licensed structural engineer so nothing i say in this video should be taken as absolute fact don't sue me for anything but if this is not a structural wall then you can just put a flat one and a half inch two by four on top of this guy and you don't need to make it like a beam that can carry significant load a flat plate just like what's down here will work if it's carrying any kind of load or you're not sure then what you should do is make a little beam sandwich where you take a two by four put it on side so it's it's actually one and a half inches by three inches i'll just come in here and model it real quick there's already a long video so what you're going to do is you're going to put a 2x4 on its side and that's going to be this first inch and a half and then you're going to put a strip of like half inch plywood or something wood in between them for 0.5 inches and then you're going to put another 2x4 for this last inch and a half and you're gonna so you're gonna make that little beam sandwich and it's gonna be three and a half inches and you would set it up here on its side and that's how you would add like some structural strength to it that's how you'd make a mini beam i think it's called a lamb beam but if this is not structural you don't have to worry about that so we're going to model it this way flat bottom plate we're going to extrude it we're going to bring it all the way to the right edge of our doorway and you don't have to worry about these crossers because now what you can do is grab your mouse tool and you're just going to start deleting out the elements that are in the doorway and since we made our top beam already we're not cutting out the stuff above which is going to make our lives really easy which i'll show in a second so just clear out everything you had made that's now inside the doorway and delete out these extra lines in your header beam delete delete delete delete i'm not going to say delete every time i'm not going to do it delete and delete okay and the last couple things you should draw in because you notice your b your verticals got cut off here so they don't look like two by fours anymore go ahead and draw in the feet uh i don't know if it's the right term go ahead and draw on these bottom lines so that they'll fill in but i'm gonna zoom back real quick so uh i'll clean up these lines as well but you see we just put a doorway in and this is sweet but we have to add what's called the king studs so those were called the jack studs right the ones that kind of define the doorway opening the next thing we're going to do is called the king studs but if you've ever seen a doorway you've probably noticed that you don't have to step over a 2x4 to get into it that's because both sides of the doorway get independently screwed into the ground and then we can go ahead and i gotta put my bottom lines in there too um so if you did frame the wall you probably did do one continuous piece of wood across the bottom well once you stand it up and screw it into the floor or nail it into the floor you can cut out this middle point inside the door because both sides are independently mounted to the floor and then the top plate is going to be mounted to the ceiling so you go ahead and clean that up and now you have a doorway okay so that's pretty cool let me grab my mouse tool again and get out of here oh boy there we go all right clicking trouble okay so um the king studs are what go right next to the jack studs but they are floor-to-ceiling two by fours so you this is pretty easy to model you just come in right next to your jack studs and you make another three and a half by one and a half and you put that on both sides and actually what's neat about this there is exactly an inch and a half gap between just the 2x4 that would have been there on center this gap's one and a half inches i didn't plan it that way some people some builders may just put little blocks of wood in between these two because it's kind of overkill to put another two by four here so you could put little um 2x4 wedges in here and just screw it in three or four places the purpose of this is so that your doorway has vertical support all the way floor to ceiling and it can't wiggle side to side i also didn't mention it the name of these things that go from the top and maintain the 16 inch on center um those are called cripples and they go in above your doorway to maintain the 16 inch on center spacing which is important for like running electrical or anything like that so we are going to go ahead and put the jack studs in be i'm just going to do it to show that you need to have some kind of support here so this is called a king stud it goes right next to your jack stud and it runs from the floor to the ceiling and you're gonna make sure that this is screwed laterally into your jack stud a few places too because normally for these studs you're just putting them in the ground and then you're putting them in the ceiling there's also if you have a room that's like above standard height so say these were 10 foot or 12 foot ceilings and if you don't want to worry about getting like perfectly straight two by fours or you're worried about warping you can put cross bracing in here so you could put little spacing two by fours throughout this and attach them horizontally and that would kind of prevent side to side movement we're not going to do that for the purposes of this video but what you can see here is we have kind of this perfect structural modeled wall showing all the two by fours required plus a doorway um one more thing that i wanted to do real quick because we made our drywall rectangles in the beginning it'd be a shame not to use them i'm going to go ahead and grab one of them i'll grab this back one and i'm going to pull that up to the top and i really wish actual drywall got uh frank got mounted that easily but um so i'm gonna take this doorway i'm gonna click on the rectangle inside the doorway and i'm gonna use my extrude tool to punch it through to this face and it just automatically cuts out the drywall for that opening so if i grab my measuring tape we'll remember that we needed the rough opening to be what did i say 32 24 this is 34 inches we're doing a 32 inch door yeah okay perfect and then we needed it to be 84 inches high no 82 inches high because the door is 80 inches sorry i'm getting confusing myself it's been a long video but this is perfect the last thing you can do this is going to help yourself as much as it's going to help anyone you may pass the model to check and see if you have any like straggler lines and just clear them up because you don't want confusion so lines like these that are left over from two by fours that we deleted out anything like that make sure every two by four has a base plate and then one nice feature of sketchup uh you can go into this materials tool on the side go down to wood grab one that just kind of looks plain doesn't really have to be anything special and just start filling in everything that's wood and you can either leave the drywall as white or you can give it a special color if you're going to make a legend that says like blue is drywall or something you can do that but this also makes your model like really easy to understand so you can take a look at this model and just instantly know where the different materials are i pretty much always add texture to a model especially if i'm showing it to anyone else um or helping like a builder understand like where things are and it goes pretty fast because it's basically just like paint it gives you a little bucket you click whatever surfaces you want filled in i'm not going to spend too long making sure i caught every little rectangle oops i maybe need surface there interesting uh okay so we're just gonna go with this because i'm at like a half hour video already but um the next thing you could do from this now is you could well you could model in all four walls you could throw electrical in here you could throw plumbing in here you could throw anything you needed to in here you could model ductwork and ventilation coming through so that's the basic concept of how to make a dimensionally accurate um structurally correct 2x4 wall and i'm not gonna pull it up because if you were to just cover this then like what would the point of putting the two by fours in be but you could pull like the drywall potentially halfway up just to show it is going to be a covered wall and then you could start layering it so you could basically give other people the permission to i'm going to just undo that you could give other people permission to delete entities and view things that are inside your model but for now i think that's everything you need in this video i hope you found it useful if you are enjoying the sketchup tutorial series be sure to let me know about in the comments below if there's something specific you'd like to see in a future video let me know about that as well be sure to check out the channel and subscribe to stay up to date with all the new stuff coming out um and uh just be sure to leave a like subscribe to the channel if you found any of it useful it's a pretty new channel and i'm just getting started out so i really appreciate your support and as always good luck with your projects and thanks for watching thanks bye