Welcome back to the Remington build. This weather has been crazy – it's been raining, it's been snowing, it's been warm, but mostly mud. But we want to talk a little bit about the internal framing. That is the next step in this process. We've got everything ready on the inside for what we can do to be ready for spray foam. Spray foam is happening next weekend. Let's talk through a few things that have to do with the interior.
Ceiling Joists:
There are no interior walls put up yet, and that is the benefit of a post-frame home. You can do the entire outside, get it closed in, and then work on the inside. But there are a few things you need to do to get ready for spray foam. We got all the ceiling joists up just because on a rainy day, we decided to put them up. We used under-mount hangers and two by fours as our joists. Some of these bays are eight feet, some a couple are a little bit smaller. The under-mount hangers were put in there with Teko nails, the same nails that I use to put in the dropped-in purlins.
Our ceiling joists are just two by fours that run from inside the bottom cord of the truss to inside the bottom cord of the next truss, and they're two feet on center. Ceiling joists are not necessary to have done before the spray foam, but we had the opportunity, so we got it done. When cutting ceiling joists, I prefer to cut them all at once. To do this, I got the two by fours set up on end, I squared them, put a screw in this big square to hold them in place, and then you can just zip through and cut them all at once.
Prep for Spray Foam:
On all the exterior walls, we are doing internal girts on this one, so they're going to be two feet on center. The bottom one is green treated; we have that installed. On these walls we have plastic sticking up that goes down along this ICF form and underneath the insulation and slab of the concrete. Eventually we will trim the excess plastic off. The whole inside bay from the bottom of this green treated internal girt to the bottom of the exterior grade board is going to get filled in with spray foam. The spray foam will then continue up the wall. He'll start out by filling all the gaps in; this is very important with spray foam. You want to make sure that your spray foam builds up these spots behind your columns prior to spraying everything else. The same thing with your cross-bracing; start by filling those.
And then, he'll come all the way up, and you can see we have our top girt already on, and then we capped it off with plywood. So that will get filled just like the bottom, sealing that off from the unconditioned attic space. If you had a conditioned attic, the spray foam would just continue up the wall, up the ceiling, all that kind of good stuff.
Another very important detail in a post-frame home is that the columns go all the way up. This gets overlooked just because of the way it's built. Typically, you have external girts, internal girts, and that leaves a void from the inside conditioned space up into the attic, and you don't want that. You want to get that sealed off. So, we put plywood all the way around to seal that off, and then he'll put the spray foam, fill that whole bay up there, and then come down the side. This will be a really efficient house; it's got nine-foot ceilings; it's a little over 1600 square feet. The next step is the spray foam, and then once he comes in, gets the spray foam done, we will put all the exterior, all the internal girts the rest of the way up, and then we can build our walls.
That will be done next weekend; we're pretty much ready. We just have a little bit of steel over here on the front porch; you can see where it's light to finish up. But other than that, we're pretty much ready, waiting on this sliding door should be in soon. If it doesn't get in, I can just run the steel over that so he can go ahead and spray it.
That's going to be a wrap on the introduction to the interior framing. We'll try to get the spray foam filmed if we can; if not, we'll film the finished product. But if you guys have any questions, don't be afraid to send them to us. Also, we have a Patreon build group where every month we talk about a different topic. We let everyone know the topic in advance so you can ask questions. I'll go through the topic, then answer everybody's questions; it's a pretty sweet deal. The goal of it is to get you in contact with other people who build in your locations, so you can have up-to-date information on that.
Thank you,
MR Post Frame
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