SOME ESSENTIALS OF FRAME DESIGN Basically, a frame house is one that's supported by its walls.

The walls, that is, do more than just enclose the house; they also hold it up. This contrasts with, say, post-and-beam construction, in which most of the weight of the building sits not on its walls but on horizontal beams supported by vertical posts inside the building. You commonly see post-and-beam design in barns, where the exterior walls are often too tall and flimsy to be relied on for support and where, because of the large spaces a barn has to enclose, there aren't enough interior walls to support the lofts and large roofs that barns generally have. Sometimes residential buildings combine frame design with post-and-beam especially if they have a very large downstairs space -- the living room, let's say. The rest of the downstairs, composed of smaller rooms, would be crisscrossed with enough walls to support the upstairs (which is why those walls would be called "bearing walls"; they bear the weight of the story above). But the big living room, being an expanse uninterrupted by such walls, might have to be spanned overhead by a number of beams supported here and there by posts. The outbuilding we'll be putting up, however, relies solely on its walls for support, so it's of pure frame design. Frame construction is probably the easiest kind for the beginner because structural members are comparatively light and easy to join together. It also requires only a minimum of engineering, and its basic principles can be mastered -- make that "comprehended," since mastery is somewhat beyond the scope of this book -- fairly swiftly. We'll start from the bottom and work our way upward. The lowermost -- and normally the most massive -- horizontal members of a standard frame structure are the girders. They usually run the length of the house, and in full-sized houses they're ordinarily doubled or tripled 2x12s. If the house has a concrete basement or crawl space, their ends often sit in depressions molded into the concrete called "girder pockets." And if they span any appreciable distance they're usually supported at regular intervals by cylindrical steel posts called "Lally columns." (The post-and-beam principle intruding once again.) The boards laid horizontally along the tops of the foundation walls arc called "sills" or "house sills." They're usually bolted to the foundation, and because they transfer their load directly to the foundation they're generally thinner than the girders. The top surfaces of the sills are level with the top surfaces of the girders, and for all practical purposes they function just as girders do.

Now, set at right angles across the tops of the sills and girders, come the floor joists. They'll most likely be 2x1Os or 2x8s or even 2x6s, depending on how much distance they have to span. If construction is conventional, the joists will be spaced at 16" intervals. Since they're sitting on their short side (the 2" side rather than, say, the 10" side), there's the chance they could twist, so if they span any appreciable distance between girders or between girder and sill, the joists will have either wooden or metal "bridging" nailed between them. The simplest bridging consists of sections of the same size boards as the joists themselves. An alternative method is called "cross-bridging," in which wood or metal struts are nailed crosswise between the joists.

Some basic parts of a frame structure (with some pieces cut away and a couple of walls missing).