Workshop on the Grapevine: Shop Walls and Top Floor Trusses

Date: August 11 - August 13, 2025

Summit Lumber didn't disappoint on the next delivery which arrived on Friday as promised.

As I was walking around on the deck getting a sense of the space, I made an impromptu change to my design. Which was the decision to add a window on the north wall toward the east side so that back corner of the shop would have some light and ventilation. I called Asheville Windows and Doors and added another 2x3 double hung window to the order. It won't be arriving on with the main order, but I can install it later.

Framing walls is pretty straightforward except that the window and door rough openings have to be precisely according to plan. I didn't foresee it buy my design of nine foot walls corresponds with pre-cut 2"x6" studs which mean they could be used as delivered from the lumber yard. Assembly of the wall is done on flat on the floor, where having a level surface is a prerequisite.

Then stand them up, which requires a lot of strong backs:

A wall with a bunch of windows is even heavier because of the chunky headers.

Then sheath with ½" OSB chip board which gives the wall shear strength.

View from the sun room in the house:

Stormy skies but no rain.

That was all one day's work. Early on we could tell that there weren't enough 2x6s to finish the framing, so Monday noontime I did a gofer ("go for") run to Summit with the pickup to get more. I ran into rain about 10 miles out, so we were getting lucky. While at Summit I got a call from Appalachian Truss asking if they move up delivery to that afternoon because of the big rains forecast for Tuesday. I thought of all that activity on the job site and said OK if they could make it after 4pm. They declined with "I guess we'll chance it tomorrow morning."

Loading 16' boards in an 8' pickup truck bed always presents a challenge! Which I solved on this occasion by also buying a bunch of 9' stud lengths which could stack on top of them and anchor the cantilever. I have straps, ropes and red flags in the back seat of my truck at all times so that I can secure loads.

The rain wasn't too hard Monday night and the truss delivery worked out fine Tuesday morning:

When planning the end walls, I looked at the rough opening specified by Asheville Window and Door for the entrance door and realized that she had specified a 30" door. The requirements list that I had sent her in June said 32" clearly. 30" is really too small. I got on the phone and told her there was a mistake, and that maybe if they got in touch with Marvin factory they could change it. I wasn't sure they would change it since I'd signed off on the proposal. And in retrospect it seemed like I should have known since I found a problem with the french doors.

I told Austen to make the rough-in big enough for a 32" door. The end walls were assembled:

I was trying to stay out of the way, and as a result I found a problem with the framing after the fact. The red arrow below indicates the header for the half door is at about 8' height.

Whereas my plan shows that it should be around 6' high:

It's hard to know why that wasn't understood. However not a huge deal since the opening can be framed down and the header where it is provides the required strength to bridge the wall. And in a way the way its done might be preferable in case anyone ever wants to install a full door or window in that spot. Meanwhile I heard back from Asheville Windows and Doors who said that even though they were too late to stop the manufacture of the 30" door, they would fix the error and order me a 32" at no cost to me. So that was a relief. But delivery of the door will be delayed of course.

With the walls up, I told Austen I would do the truss layout (i.e. mark where they should be placed). This second layer of trusses was not as straight forward as the first layer because they had to accommodate a stairwell. I discussed the nuances of the stairwell layout in my early post on Design Refinement. In my design I had leveraged the stairwell gap to reduce the number of trusses by working out from the center. That's not the standard way. The usual approach is to layout the trusses from one end to the other with the same distance between them everywhere, then subtract whatever trusses would fall within the stairwell. Austen said we should do it the standard way so that they could just run the sub-floor sheeting without cutting it. I showed him that this would result in the double trusses for the stairwell being just 4" from another truss, which I considered a waste. It certainly wasn't required for strength. That didn't convince him. But what did is the fact that we didn't have enough trusses to do the layout the way he wanted.

The other thing that surprised him was that I didn't order the pony walls from the truss company and that he would have to build them. (Pony walls are the wall above the end walls parallel to the trusses.) I'd forgotten about that detail, and if I had remembered earlier he could have just build the end walls two feet taller.

Discussions over, Tuesday afternoon saw the start of truss placement. These form the ceiling of the shop and floor of the top story:

I was called on to make an executive decision at this point. The truss folks recommend making the truss a little shorter than the span in order to make sure they never have to be trimmed to fit. We found we had about ¾" on the end which would need to be "packed out". Austin asked whether they should leave that gap in the front or the back. Choosing the back seemed better at the time. Of course later when it came to dealing with the ramifications it was clear the front would have been a better choice! I told him I would prepare the ¾" boards to put on the end of the trusses from my stash of wood in the lower barn.

The remainder of the trusses were placed Wednesday.