Journey of a Home Office Begins ...

Every Journey starts with that first step.  One of the best benefits of my job is the flexibility to work remotely - e.g., ability to work from home.  Since I average at least 4 out of 5 days from home, I need a dedicated office area to work from.  Our house has an unfinished basement.  This will be the 2nd time I've worked to finish a basement.  Hopefully I will have learned from the last time we finished a basement (in our Harpers Ferry House) and can make this basement even better.

I've chose a corner of our walk-out basement.  I like our basement because it has tall ceilings (9') and it's a walk out, so there are full sized windows !

The soil in this area is supposed to be quite expansive.  The means that the floors may (or may not) heave.  The slab floors here are poured separately from the walls so they can move independently if need be.  When building walls in the basement,  we had to be cognisant of building the walls in a way that would allow that heaving to occur without cracking the walls or damaging the floors above.   There is a cool way that the building walls that enable this.  The wall construction is done by;

1. Measure the height from floor to Ceiling
2. Subtract 3" from that measurement & that's the measurement that I built the wall sections to
3. The wall section was built using normal stud spacing of 16" o.c..
4. Lay the PT sill plate with construction adhesive and powder charged nails.
5. Lift your wall section and secure it to the ceiling using nails (ensuring you remain plumb with the sill plate)
6. Every 2' you will run a 6" spike through the bottom of the wall panel into the sill plate.  I found that it was easier to drill a hole that allows the spike to pass through the bottom plate just barely.  you don't need to pre-drill the sill plate.  The walls were amazingly sturdy and strong for not having a floor to ceiling connection.

Framing begins ...

Finally finished framing - Long way still left to go, but rough framing  - DONE!