WHY is that FLOOR FRAMING RECESSED ??

Added: 2026-04-28

[00:00:00][music] >> Hey, Steve Basic Architect slash gymnast. Are you ready for this?

[00:00:09]This is where I do my double back hamstring to a half pike and then I hit it right there on the dirt. Are you ready?

[00:00:24]Yeah, right.

[00:00:25]Even if I attempted, we all know where I'd be.

[00:00:29]I'd be down there in about 2 seconds.

[00:00:33]All right. What are we talking about today? Not gymnastics. Although, we could call it framing gymnastics today.

[00:00:39]All right?

[00:00:41]We got a little depression here. What's going on?

[00:00:45]We have all of our floor framing. We have this one here. If we pan out, you could see there's three more on that side of the house.

[00:00:56]This depression is for a curbless shower.

[00:00:59]Right? So, we run our floor joists through here and then we head this off with LVLs. Um our structural engineer was feeling beefy the day they uh did this one. So, we have four LVLs here, four there.

[00:01:18]We have a pair that run horizontally to frame out that opening and then we simply frame 2 by 10s inside that opening and they're dropped down 5 in.

[00:01:30]And that 5 in will build that up with the inch and an eighth.

[00:01:33]We'll build it up with a nice mud slope to our drain there and then that'll help us >> [clears throat] >> get a nice curbless environment. The curbs curbless side is this side of the shower. It's a full zero entry. And again, remember when we talked about the floor joists out here, these are a couple. They want to age in place. So, all of the details from this point forward or in design were thought about that concept of aging in place. If you're not familiar with it, Google it.

[00:02:09]It just means I want to live in my house as long as I possibly can. Right? I want to grow old here. I don't want the house to become the reason I have to move. So, we have that drop down shower framework there. Let's jump back to the studio.

[00:02:24]We'll pull out some framing drawings.

[00:02:26]We'll look at some details. We'll talk about it in detail. We'll break out big red. Fire up that vibe board and we'll talk back at the studio.

[00:02:37]All right. Well, welcome back to the studio. Um hopefully you enjoyed that uh me walking the tightrope out there on those uh floor trusses and beams. I'm like a cat. You know, I get complimented on that all the time.

[00:02:52]Um it's like, "Damn, Steve. You're like a cat out there, man." Um just running around on top of all those uh LVLs and floor trusses. Hey, I do what I can to bring you the best videos I can. So, anyways, you know what?

[00:03:09]Got that vibe board fired up. You ready?

[00:03:11]I'm ready.

[00:03:12]Let's talk.

[00:03:15]We're going to bring the ghost line in.

[00:03:17]So, let's talk a little bit about the floor plan. Get you uh to understand the house a little bit.

[00:03:24]Front door right there. We have a front porch right there. This body here is set up to be basically the main house, right? So, you walk in the entry door, you have the ability to see in the study, ability to see in the the dining room, and ability to see into the living room, and basically see out to that back patio.

[00:03:46]The front study entry dining room with a service pantry makes up kind of the front half. The back half, family room, nice very sizable family room there. And then, of course, the kitchen over here, nice big island, as well as a breakfast room. Breakfast room has access out to the patio. Family room has access out to the patio. Three-car garage over here with some workshop space. And between them, we have what I call the Costco pantry, big storage pantry, and the mudroom and powder room with >> [clears throat] >> a uh service pantry there. But uh what we're going to talk about today is actually on this side. Um so, when we come down the hall here, whether from the study or family room, we have a fitness room here. Treadmill, bike, not uh you know, not huge weight systems.

[00:04:45]They're aging in place retirement couple. So, they want to get their exercise in, yoga mat, all that good stuff. Um so, very uh what do you call it? Modest family room or fitness room. And then, laundry on the front here that services the bedroom wing. Nice hallway here that splits between the owner's suite and the other suites. Um notice bedroom one, bedroom two, bedroom three, and bedroom four. So, we have four bedroom suites.

[00:05:20]Um bedroom four is probably the most modest. That one there, we actually have a bathtub. So, grandkids come over, you want to throw them in the tub. We actually have a soaking tub in bedroom one, but again, more modest um tub shower combo and closet there. So, this is surface mounted. So, it really doesn't fall into the realm [clears throat] of what we were doing today.

[00:05:48]Um but bedroom three, notice we have a shower here.

[00:05:55]Bedroom two and bath two, we have a shower here.

[00:06:01]And bedroom one, we have a shower there. So, curbless, curbless, and curbless. Um you know, yes, they're aging in place. So, definitely that one, but you have your sister come over or your brother, um your mother, father, father-in-law, mother-in-law, they all come to visit.

[00:06:28]Well, all appreciate a curbless shower. For those of you not familiar with curbless shower, let's uh just talk a little bit about what that is. So, we'll have our framing member and then we'll have our floor sheathing and then our hardwood floor or tile in this case here.

[00:06:51]Um and what the curbless shower is, you know, typically you might just continue that floor system and have a curb here with the shower door on it. But in a curbless situation, it means just that. There is no curb.

[00:07:09]Right? The shower gets dropped down a couple inches into that framing and we'll have some associative framing members here that are picking up another level of subfloor.

[00:07:28]And this is probably somewhere in a 2 in plus plus or minus range. A lot of it now depends on when people say, "Well, I want to do a curbless shower."

[00:07:39]What we have to come to terms with with the builder. Are we doing a Schluter system, a Kerdi system, um Laticrete system? Um there's a lot of systems out there. Some of them require a little bit more space than others. Is it a single slope drain versus a center drain? And why that matters is if I have a large shower, let's just say 6 ft by 4 ft.

[00:08:07]If I do a center drain, then that means my slope here is 2 ft, my slope here is 2 ft, my slope here is 3 ft, and my slope here is 3 ft.

[00:08:22]Right? Sloping down, sloping down, sloping down, sloping down. So, if I had a requirement, I don't know. Let's just say quarter inch per foot, right?

[00:08:35]2 ft, well, that's a half inch slope there.

[00:08:39]3/4 of an inch slope there. So, pretty modest. But let's do that same shower now and say instead of putting the drain there, we put the drain here.

[00:08:52]Now, I have a 6 ft run to that drain. And that quarter of an inch, it's an inch and a half. So, it's twice the slope that I have here. So, I have to make up for that. Now, it's not hard, but understand, you know, when the that goes down there, this floor is an inch and a half lower than the floor there. So, if you're doing tile with a continuous uh you know, band or something down at the bottom, well, that's going to grow that inch and a half. So, you have to take into account where the drain is, how deep it goes, what type of system you're using, what kind of tile are you using?

[00:09:35]Is it just kind of a and an anonymous, you know, white subway tile on the wall with maybe a little pencil or something up high? Or are you doing some kind of base tile where it really matters that you're losing that inch and a half down there. So, these are all the things that you kind of have to take into account of um when you're doing it. You can't just say, "Oh, curbless shower." And that's the end of decisions. No, no, no. That just opens a door to, you know, 20 30 more decisions. So, uh trying to understand exactly what those are and then developing it. So, we were right at I believe we did it for about 2 and 1/2 in.

[00:10:21]And uh our floor system was 14 in on this project. So, that leaves us about 12 in uh to uh mess around with there. So, we can uh I mean, these showers you can infill that with 2 by 8 floor framing, 2 by 6 12 in on center, 2 by 8 16. I usually do 12 in and even if we did the 2 by 8, we would just put in a couple extra. We want to keep that floor nice and solid. Um, especially with tile on it. We don't want it to uh you know, deflect and crack there.

[00:10:55]Um, so, again, notice I'll highlight these in red. So, we have that area, that area, that area.

[00:11:07]So, we've made the decision. We know um what's going to happen. Now, we have to translate that to the framer.

[00:11:15]Right? And the truss manufacturer and such. So, here you see it. There's our system and we call out the size of that shower floor there. And we also call out the dimensions here, you can see, that get us to the inside of those LVLs there. And again, over here.

[00:11:43]And likewise up here.

[00:11:47]We have that all called out. So, those are all there. Also note, you know, on there, we do solid framing. So, we do LVLs and then we do the little bridge across there. This one here just went all the way across. This one we did all the way across and did a couple bridges there.

[00:12:04]Um, and that allows us to uh get that one.

[00:12:09]This was actually a hole. Sorry about that. I highlighted that as a shower.

[00:12:13]That's actually a stair that goes down um into the crawlspace that we had on the plan. We can go back and talk about that as a little bonus if you want. Um, and then of course, over here, we have our uh LVLs that went across here and then our kind of double bridge. And for whatever reason, the structural engineer just said, "You know what? Let's just do these as all LVLs around the bathroom and that will help stiffen up that floor a little for, you know, you put in a little larger mat uh floor tile, get a little less deflection in that floor, make it a little stiffer floor, and that'll benefit you. But uh you know, and then the obviously the truss people, they take that, they lay out all their trusses accordingly and uh we review it and then uh yeah, they get installed and uh it's like you see out there on the job site.

[00:13:13]You have all of that floor framing in there.

[00:13:16]But uh go back here and just show you this right quick. We'll highlight this one in purple cuz we don't have it. Um you can see right here.

[00:13:27]That's actually a set of stairs that go down to the crawlspace. So, we have a door here centered on that hallway.

[00:13:35]So, when you look down the hallway, see that door perfectly framed there. But if you open it up, there's basically a set of stairs down there. Now, why would I do that? Um, aging in place.

[00:13:47]We could certainly get away with This could have been a closet and we could have got away with a 20 by 30 in little scuttle hole pull up piece of plywood and jump down.

[00:13:58]Now, 70-year-old [clears throat and snorts] client, there's probably no jumping left in their world. Um and it's not uh a criticism or an indictment, it's just fact, right? There's not a lot of jumping in my world and I'm not nearly 70 yet. Um but when you're asking homeowners to do things like, "Hey, you got to replace filters in that air handling system and or if you want to get your Christmas decorations." You really want to make life and aging in place, the whole idea is to develop a higher level of comfort and ease and safety, right? You don't want anybody getting hurt. Um, so, we had this large walk-in closet at one point that encompassed the whole thing.

[00:14:49]And I brought it up to the homeowners.

[00:14:50]They said, "Let's just take a small piece of that. You still get a substantial closet, 5 and 1/2 ft by 8 ft." So, it's a basically a a modest bathroom size, right? About 45 sq ft. And we'll put in a series of stairs. And now you can open the door and literally walk down the stairs. Now, when you get down there, obviously you're going to have to duck and get under that crawlspace, the you know, the 40-in crawlspace that we have down there. Um, but if we put the air handling equipment in close proximity to the bottom of the stairs, now you can go down, you can store your extra filters, you can grab it, slide the old one out, slide the new one in, carry the old one up the stairs and uh close the door behind you and uh nobody's the wiser, right? You don't have any idea until that door opens where that goes.

[00:15:43]So, just a little bit uh added bonus for today. That's what I do.

[00:15:50]Bring bonuses to your world.

[00:15:52]So, you know what? I'm Steve Basic Architect.

[00:15:59]We are talking on the vibe board, but let's talk Build Show.

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[00:16:35]Build Show Live, November 7th, 8th, 9th, Austin Convention Center.

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[00:17:28]And uh of course, on that first day, VIP pass, morning's 301, the afternoon, we are going to visit job sites. We're going to walk around job sites. Me, you, Matt. Maybe we can coax Jake and some other people into joining us. And uh yeah.

[00:17:45]We'll be talking building construction all day, even into the after-party, we can still talk building construction. So, you're never going to wear me out. I'm actually looking forward to it. So, if you haven't gotten your tickets yet, >> [clears throat] >> make sure you head on over and grab them.

[00:18:04]All right. Well, there you have it. Curbless showers.

[00:18:10]Hopefully we learned a little something today.

[00:18:13]And uh we threw in a little bonus of uh crawlspace access via stairs.

[00:18:18]Anyways, I'm Steve Basic Architect. This is the Build Show Network. Until next time, thanks for joining in. Long live our buildings.

[00:18:31]>> [music]