- [Jeff] Hi, everybody! Jeff here again.
Today, I'm gonna show you about blocking.
This is called wall blocking.
Some people call it cabinet blocking
and this is why I always tell you it's a great idea
if you can have all of your dry wall down
and exposed down to the studs
whenever you're doing a remodel
coz then, you can see exactly what's going on
and you can also make a much better preparation
than even the builder did.
So this wall here was actually rebuilt,
this whole stud wall on the kitchen here
and blocking involves using blocks of wood like this
to put across the studs at the approximate height
where the top of the counter is going to be.
So for example, if you look at our base counters here,
you see that right there?
So right along the top edge of those counters there,
those base cabinets, those are about 34 inches.
That's pretty standard across most of the base cabinets
and so what you wanna do is you wanna have a line
at around 34 inches or so that goes across there
and you can put these blocks of wood.
So there'll be one here, one here,
straight line all the way across.
That way, you don't have to worry about
screwing through the back of the cabinet
and trying to hit a stud, trying to find a stud
or missing it or whatever.
That's what a lot of people do and usually,
for most people, it ends up being a lesson in futility.
That's what some of the old school craftsmen used to do
but when you put one of these in here,
the great thing about it is it doesn't matter
where you screw through the back of your cabinet,
you're always guaranteed to hit wood no matter what.
You're gonna hit the wood here.
Now if you look at the wood here,
you'll see, I like to use a two by six for this.
Assuming this is the top of your base cabinet
will line up to this, of course, there'll be dry wall there.
You won't be able to see it but you just have faith
and you know that when you screw
through the top of your cabinet there,
you'll be able to hit this wood
so there's a cross brace on the back of every base cabinet
and that cross brace is usually about four inches or so.
So it will be, if you could see an imaginary line,
it would be along the board like this
and the reason why I'd leave this overhang
is it just gives you more margin of error.
Alright, so we're going to toenail in this end here.
Shoot the nail up at an angle
and we do the other side here.
(tapping)
You always wanna make sure those planks are flushed
with the front end of the studs
so the dry wall won't bump out on you.
Now this one, we're gonna shoot in from the other side.
(drill revving)
Remember, these are two by sixes
so we're always going to put in three screws, three nails.
(drill revving)
There we go.
(drill revving)
There we go.
(drill revving)
Alright, so here we are looking at the finished wall here
with all of our cabinet blocks in place
for the upper and the lower cabinets.
Let's review what we've done here.
You can see, we have a whole line of them here
going across here.
These are for the bottom, for the base cabinets
and as you could see here in our picture here,
that corresponds to here.
So we made it align go all the way over here
and stop just before where the refrigerator goes
because you don't need anything behind the refrigerator.
So now that we've done those here,
one thing to look at too is now,
you have the upper cabinets to deal with
as we've pointed out before, see?
So you need a line to go
behind the bottom of the upper cabinets
and behind the bottom of these upper cabinets
which are shorter because they go over the sink
and then you need a line
to go across the top of the cabinets
wherever they're gonna mount
and according to our drawing here,
these are mounting at 96 inches above the floor
so you could see what we've done
is we went over the 96 inches above the floor here.
You could see where we marked it there
and that line up there is the upper border
of our upper cabinets.
So we come down from that mark.
So we made those go all the way across
because every upper cabinet needs
to have a plank there behind the top
and then in the middle cabinet here,
this is where the middle cabinet is that goes over the sink.
Now, these are overlapping
because they have to go between studs
so what's gonna happen here
is you're gonna have a left cabinet
that's 24 inches here that will end
probably somewhere right there
and then the upper cabinet will start here
and go over to right over to here
so that's why we have to have it span across three studs
even though we're only using 30 inches wide
out of all of that and then, you may have noticed here
that we have this big old five-inch plumbing stack here.
Going here, that's the pipe that the plumbers put in
and it spans all the way up to the ceiling
and it goes up to the roof and that's how you
put your behind water for your plumbing
but the problem here is because that is so big
and even though we went real wide on these studs,
these are two by eight studs.
It may not look like it on the video
but these are eight-inch studs
that actually measure at about seven and a quarter
so it doesn't leave you enough room here
to put the same width of two by that we put here.
We got to use a one by here to get past this pipe.
So what we're doing here is you can see,
we used a regular block.
We put a block here and then we use a one by here
to attach to the block and then
if you look real closely here,
you'll see we toe-nailed the screw in.
So what we do is we take our drill,
we pile that hole in an angle right through
to this stud here and then you run your deck screw in there
and deck screw has always been my preferred method
and the reason is that sometimes,
we end up with pieces of wood like this
that are pressure treated.
Pressure treated wood has all sorts of acids
and chemicals and whatnot that will eventually eat through,
corrode your regular screws if you use an untreated screw.
So we prefer to use deck screws here
whenever we're going into this wood
and I just use them anyway just coz I never know
what kind of wood I'm gonna be going through here
and you can see through all of the other spots on here,
we just toe-nailed them in from the top.
Some of these, you can get lucky on
and you can get in on the right side and the left side
and then the neighbor one you toed in here,
see, so here's a toe in.
Okay, so now I wanna show you something here
because there's a safety precaution here.
I've got these metal plates here
and we're gonna be screwing these on the back of these
one bys here in front of this pipe
so that somebody doesn't come along later
and accidentally screw through and pierce the pipe.
That would be really bad,
especially if it was a actual water plumbing pipe, right?
At this point here upward, it's really only just fumes
from the sewer system but if it was an actual pipe,
like a water pipe, you'd be in trouble
or what if it was an electrical cable?
And so we're gonna put these plates here
and also, when we install the dry wall,
we're gonna mark on the drywall
the width of where this pipe is
and we're just gonna have a big note that says,
hey pipe and we'll say,
do not use a screw longer than whatever length.
Well, how long are the screw should you use?
The cabinet is gonna be maybe a half inch
to a half inch thick.
Then you're gonna have a half inch of drywall
and then you have this wood here
which is probably almost an inch or so.
So we'll do a stack up once we get the cabinets here
and everything and we'll calculate ahead of time
what's the best size screw that we use
so that we don't even hit this plate.
You don't wanna hit this plate at all
and that's really only an issue in this one spot.
Everywhere else, you have no problem whatsoever.
You could see, you can go right through
the plates there with no problem and so again,
by having all of these horizontal components here,
no matter where you put your base cabinets,
that back brace piece across the back of your cabinet
is gonna line up to the top three inches or so
of each one of these members
so no matter where you put your screw,
you're not gonna miss.
That's the beauty of this and this is
why you wanna have your walls wide open
when you're doing these kind of stuffs
so you can see, we've got nice blockage going here
and the other thing too that we're going to add,
you have to make sure you do this
is these, see these block braces here?
These are like these because these act as your fire blocks
so we're probably gonna add some right here and here
and what that does is everything that's below,
like the electricity is mostly gonna be below.
If you ever have a fire and that's why
you have these cavities in the wall here,
if there's ever a fire in the wall,
all the heat and vapor and fumes and stuff
will not go shooting straight up to the attic immediately
and going up and then causing a fire.
Your whole house would burn down
in a matter of five minutes.
It would just spread rapidly.
So this prevents like a chimney effect here.
It's not an end-all, it's not 100% fire stop.
What it does is everything you do in the house
to prevent fire just delays the time.
It just gives you more time to get out of the house.
It gives the fire department more time to get there
to save the house.
Here you have it here
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