Carpentry Iowa City

Clever Carpentry Tips and Tricks for Your Home

Building a home or doing renovations on its interior or exterior can be quite a challenge if you don’t take the time to perform many different steps properly. Thankfully, the best carpentry in Iowa City, Iowa doesn’t have to be a significant challenge. Instead, you can work with professionals who fully understand the following tips or utilize them on your own. At Ramsey Creek, we have the kind of experience with a building that your home needs to look great.

Don’t Use Strings to Frame a Project

The idea that strings help to frame carpentry is a common idea that stretches back decades. And it is not necessarily a bad one. Many carpenters use lines to mount things like home foundations, walls, and much more. And if you are building a larger project, they can be instrumental in many situations. However, they may also get in the way and don’t provide the type of benefits that you may want.

For example, strings can very quickly move or sag when you aren’t there and could cause you to make a mistake in the building process. Even worse, they may end up snapping and leaving you without a guide for the project. Even on smaller projects, such as adding cabinets to a kitchen, this problem can be a concern that needs to be addressed ASAP to ensure the best results.

Instead of using strings, use construction lumber tacked together to create an outline of your project. Square these sides to keep them together and then use it as a guide for the rest of the project. The size of this template can vary massively, and it will need to be bigger than the project so that the interior of its sides match the outside or inside of the project. But using them properly can help out a lot.

Don’t Ignore Stud Location

When you are planning a building project, you need to make sure that you have enough studs to support your walls. Studs are critical for holding up the walls and also serve many other purposes. Some carpenters will tell you that you can never have too many studs, but you should avoid spending an excessive amount of money on studs that you may not need and which may cost good cash to replace.

For example, you typically need at least one stud per every linear foot of the wall. That doesn’t mean that you’ll be adding a stud every foot or so – though you might – so much as you’ll be preparing for potential problems. For example, extra studs are useful if you make a carpentry mistake, and they also help you create corners, window frames, door frames, and braces throughout the house.

And the location of your studs should be broad enough that you can hang drywall on it quite easily. Typically, panes of drywall are at least 3-5 feet wide, perhaps even longer, depending on the home and your project. Talk to your construction manager about this process to learn more about what to expect and how you can plan out your stud location in a way that makes sense for your home’s needs.

Pay Attention to Trim

Have you ever trimmed out a whole room on your own or watched a carpenter do it for you? If you have, you know that this process isn’t exactly always easy. Unfortunately, it can often be a challenge to get the kind of high-quality protection that your home needs. That’s because you may not pay enough attention to this element or don’t hire professionals who know the importance of trim.

The trim in your carpentry projects helps to keep the walls and other areas protected from damage. For example, trim at the edges of your walls covers up the areas where the walls meet the ceiling or floor. This helps to keep ants, termites, and other pests from getting behind your walls. And trim also helps to create a more attractive look by making your walls, ceiling, and floor seem more integrated and robust together.

If you aren’t sure what kind of trim to add to your home – hint, it should, at the very least, match your wall color and materials – you should contact a professional right away. These experts fully understand how to provide you with the trim that you need for your projects. Just as importantly, they can perform any other steps that you need to keep your home looking strong and great for years to come.

Put Away Your Tape Measurer When Cutting

Here’s an interesting tip that you might not get from a lot of carpentry experts – you should put your tape measurer away when you are cutting longer boards. There are a few reasons that we suggest this step. Before we go into them, we want to state that tape measures are essential tools that should never be entirely discarded.

However, we do believe that you should put them away when cutting large items – such as drywall or boards – for your home. That’s because the “hold up and measure” method works a lot better and is more accurate. This method works by forcing you to hold the board up to where it needs to fit, marking the edges where it needs to be cut, and then using a t-square to draw a cut line.

When you perform this step, you give yourself a straight line that is easy to cut and which is very accurate. That’s because you may make a mistake when measuring the board that you can’t make when marking them in this way. Errors you might make include measuring from a slightly wrong place before you cut or holding the measurer in a position that causes difficulties.

Who Can You Trust?

As you can see, getting the best carpentry Iowa City, Iowa has to offer is not a significant challenge. That said, you do need to pay attention to not only these elements of your home design but also any upgrades that you might need to do to keep your house secure. Thankfully, you can contact us at Ramsey Creek to learn more. Our professionals have years of experience and can help you when others have let you down or failed to perform up to your understandably high expectations.