I’m Bill with BGB Builders. Our project today is building a closet. Our first step is going to be laying out our walls.
For this step I’m going to the need the help of my lovely wife and employee, Genna Frishman. First thing we’re going to do is decide how big to make our closet. Now, in this area you can see really the only thing I’m constrained by are my windows. So, what I’m going to do is take a measurement from the corner to the window. I’ve got 63 inches.
Now, what I’m going to do is deduct four inches from that; three of which being from my window trim, and another inch to make up the difference for the drywall plus just a little bit just to be safe. So, I’m going to mark my wall at 59 inches, and I’ll do the same on the other side.
Now, let’s mark our wall. As we said, we’re going to use 59 inches, and we’re going to mark 59 inches to the outside of our wall. We’re going to take off three-and-a-half for the width of the bottom plate.
Now, we’ll do the same thing on this side, with the only difference being that I’ve taken a few inches off just because I want that closet to be a little wider than I do want it to be deep. We can get Genna to mark us at 51-1/2 inches. Our window was the same, 63, but like I said, I held it back a little farther, so go ahead and mark the outside of that plate, and then once again on the inside at 3-1/2 back.
Now, let’s go ahead and snap our chalk lines. Now, if Genna holds the chalk line at the outside measurement here. Now, we’ve pulled this measurement off of that wall at 59 inches as well, and that assumes that this outside wall is square, but I’m going to show you here in a second how to double check that measurement and we’ll do that again. We’ll roll our chalk line back each time to make sure we get some more chalk on it, and we’ll do the inside of the stud now.
We’ll do this one more time for this wall, once again at the outside, and lastly on the inside. Now, the last thing I want to do when I’m laying out my walls is to make sure that I’m square. What I do is use a principle that we’ve all learned in the Math class probably back in elementary school called the Pythagorean triple; a2+b2=c2.
What I’m going to do is use the three sides of the triangle to make sure that I’m square. So, what I’m going to do is mark 3-foot on this side, I’m going to mark 4-foot. We’re going to mark four foot on this side, and that hopefully is going to leave us with 60 inches or five feet. So, let’s hold our tape at the four foot mark, I’ll be at the three-foot mark, and we’ve got 60 inches as you can see. We know our closet is square. Let’s move on to the next step, which would be the construction of our walls.