A few times while building our house I have been especially grateful for kind sub contractors that gently point out something important that I might be forgetting. While we were framing up our house this happened, and so I wanted to pass it on to all you first-time-general-contractors such as myself.
There are a few things that you may want to put in your house that actually need to be placed inside before all of the walls and doors are finished up. That is, unless you really like a challenge and prefer to use a crane to drop in your enormous master bathroom tub. If that’s the case … go ahead and frame up your whole house first. If not …
Trying to fit a large object through your front door, down the hall, and around the corner, without dinging up the walls and your shiny new item will be a nightmare at best. Heck, it may even be impossible depending on the sizes of everything involved.
So here are a few things that you don’t want to forget to put inside your house while you are framing or shortly after:
- Bathtubs– Even if it’s a small tub, put it in before the drywall. Then put a piece of cardboard, plastic, fabric, or something else over the top of it to protect it from all the crap it will have to endure before your bathroom is finished.
- Shower pans and enclosures– some of these come in pieces but many of them do not. Either way, put these in during the framing. Another reason is that you want to make sure your shower space is the exact same size as your shower enclosure or pan. Especially if you bought a custom one, it may be smarter to move a small interior wall a few inches then it is to order a new shower enclosure. Or it may be a simple fix like putting an extra piece of sheeting on that wall to fill in the gap. You will want to know as early as possible. And just like your bathtubs, make sure to cover them with some sort of protection from the dirt, drywall mud, paint, etc.
- Safes– do you plan on putting a large safe inside your house anywhere? Imagine for a second moving that large safe in there after all your drywall is up and your doors are on. Does it even fit through the door? You may want to put the safe inside before you even close everything up. We didn’t, and now we are looking at either having to go with a smaller safe or cutting out a portion of our garage wall just to get the thing inside … ahhh!
- Anything else HUGE– Think through what you will have in your finished home. It may seem like a pain to put a few of these things in now, but it will be so much harder later on. How about a grand piano? Do you have a door that you can fit it through? Or a commercial size fridge or stove? If you don’t have double doors going into your house, many of these things literally won’t fit into your house.
So now you have fair warning! Get your huge things in first …. unless you own a crane.
~Farmer’s Wife
P.S. CLICK HERE to go to the full article on framing up your own house
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