Wind girts and skirting, oh my!

Here we are hanging in all our wind girt glory ... Nice!

The wind girts create nailing surfaces for the siding. We used 2" x 6", Douglas Fir, #2 studs. A few words on studs. There are two different kinds, Douglas Fir and Hemlock Fir. Lowes and Home Depot sell Hemlock Fir and most local "non-big" box stores (we have Bayview Lumber and ProBuild (formerly Lumbermans)) sell Douglas Fir. So what's the difference? Doug Fir is stronger than Hem Fir. #2 basically means, "second best" which translates into some sort of visual defect but not structural, and are cheaper. If your boards don't need to be absolutely straight than it's worth considering.

So, step by step, here's how we prepped for the hanging of the wind girts.

#1 Consult your plans, your engineer will have laid out your plans to show you at what increments your girts should be placed. He'll also tell you what size boards you will need.

#2 Get into place. Consult your plans again (measure twice cut once, right?)

#3 Measure your spacing marks. We measured from the top of the posts because we had already leveled off the top of the posts and we knew they were all the same. This is one instance though where you could measure from your common laser level mark.

#4 Once you have your lines marked on your corner posts you can use a chalk line to snap in the marks for the middle beams.

#5 Have one person hold the one side and the other hold the other (this is rocket science I know). It's worth nothing that in the end we didn't like how the snap line turned out and ended up measuring each posts marks one by one (like Mr. Nick is doing in step #3)

As part of the wind girt process we also put up the mud skirts. We re-used the concrete forms from our concrete pad installation but didn't re-use the original line. As you can see we went 1" below the original line to overlap the concrete and make sure there is no gap for critters and draft breezes to get through.

The girts went up very easy, I hold one end, Nick holds the other, nail-gun "bang, bang, bang". Repeat. Here's a short visual.




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