Concept

Framing

What it is

Framing is the wood skeleton of a house. Four systems stack on each other:

  1. Floor system: joists plus a beam or load-bearing wall underneath, carrying the weight of everything above.
  2. Subfloor: OSB or plywood sheets screwed or nailed to the joists, giving you the surface you walk on.
  3. Walls: studs, top plate, bottom plate, and headers over every door and window opening.
  4. Roof: rafters cut on site or prefabricated trusses, tied to the top plate of the walls.

Two-story houses just repeat floor plus walls before you hit the roof. Same parts, stacked.

Pre-1940 houses use balloon framing, where wall studs run uninterrupted from the foundation to the roof with no fire blocking between floors. That’s one of several reasons I won’t buy pre-1940 houses as a flip target.

Why it matters

Three forces attack wood framing over time: water, pests, and bad workmanship. None of them are covered by insurance. All of them are invisible until you open a wall.

Water shows up as rot in bottom plates, sills, joist ends, and rim boards. Pests show up as galleries in studs and joists, or mud tunnels on the foundation wall — sometimes it’s termites, sometimes carpenter bees chewing through whole floor systems. Bad workmanship shows up as over-notched joists (plumbers love to notch out more than the 30% rule allows), missing headers, and deck beams bolted to the side of posts instead of sitting on top.

The professional DIY problem is a big one too. I’ve bought houses where, upon further inspection of the work, they hadn’t actually passed any inspection, and none of it was actually right. It was inside of the walls and you don’t find out about it until later. Bad wiring inside the walls, bad framing, undersized structural beams. There are codes and tables that tell you what size wood you should be using for certain spans — the DIYer doesn’t know those tables and nobody saw it until you opened the wall.

How it shows up

A few framing details I watch for on every deal. Any wood touching masonry must be pressure-treated. In a crawl space, that means galvanized nails too. Footers sit below the frost line — depth varies by climate, deeper in northern markets than in the South. Deck beams always sit on top of the post with a Simpson tie, never bolted to the side, because a side-bolt puts all the load on the screws instead of the footer.

Inspection sequence matters. The permit order goes foundation, MEP rough, framing and insulation, drywall, final. MEP rough happens before framing inspection because plumbers commonly damage framing during their rough-in and you want the framer to repair it before the inspector sees it.

And on subfloor: overbuild the cheap stuff. When the cost gap is small, go bigger on drainage, electrical panels, subfloor, and framing headers. Nobody sees a header. But every contractor after you will see it, and it’s the part of the house that carries every ounce of weight above it.

structural damage, grandfathering, foundation, inspections, pro diy, new builder itis