THE BEST WAY to FRAME a HEADER

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hey, build show Steve Basic Architect.

[00:00:03]Yeah, we're at one of my favorite places. We're on site. Guess what we're talking about this week? I thought maybe we would talk about tuning headers.

[00:00:14]Yeah, we're not tuning pianos. We're tuning headers. We're tuning headers for the load. Um, we're looking at the bearing capacity of the jacks and trimmers in reference to headers. We're going to do a little bit about talking about pocket headers. So this week it's everything about the header.

[00:00:35]So let's take a look at it. We have here roughly 3-foot opening. Those of you familiar with framing, you know that this is a king. This is a jacker trimmer. The jacker trimmer is what actually supports the header. Notice it stops here. The king rises up past. And that's true on this side, too.

[00:00:56]The jack trimmer stops at the head plate. The king rises all the way up to the double uh top plate there. Notice here all of my headers, my header strategy is to do a one ply, two ply, or three ply header. They have an established depth so that they're always the same as we go around the house. What differs is the thickness, right? Whether it's one, two, or three ply. In this case here, three-foot opening. We can get away with a single ply. Notice we create the pocket header. We have a head plate here. The head plate allows us to secure the drywall around that opening and give us a place to put trim or a shade or whatever the case is. But notice it gives us this pocket here.

[00:01:46]Now, the pocket there, the good thing about it is it allows the insulator to do what the insulator does when the insulator does it, right? We're not asking them to go out of sequence. We're not asking the framers to become insulators and put together rigid insulation with the headers and nail it together and sandwich it and install it.

[00:02:06]We just tell them, hey, you worry about the wood. Get it up there. Leave that space. When the insulator comes to insulate the cavities, we'll also insulate that header cavity just like we're going to insulate the rest of the walls. Now, one of the things I want to call your attention to smaller opening, 3ft opening, single jacks.

[00:02:29]What we're talking about there is this is an inch and 1/2 by 5 1/2 in. It probably is going to yield somewhere around, you know, I don't know, 9 or 10 square inches of bearing capacity. So, that plate bears on that at that 9 or 10 in for a 3-foot opening. Sure, that's fine. Let's go over to this opening here. This is the larger opening. And for our structural engineer, what we basically have on the drawings is any opening more than three feet gets double jacks. So you can see here we have two trimmers on both sides and they ride up the inside of the standard king there.

[00:03:13]And you can see we have the same pocket header. We have some cripples on the flat there to catch drywall as it goes across. But what we've done here as opposed to that is by having two of these instead of the nine or 10 square inches, we're at 18 to 20 square in of bearing capacity on each side. So that makes it that much stronger of a header.

[00:03:39]Now the header doesn't necessarily have to be larger because that smaller one is probably about three times what it actually needs to be. But because it falls in the dimensionally accurate category, we just live with the fact that it's 3 or 4x the load. This one might be 2x the load, but because we have more load coming into this in the fact that this exceeds the 3 ft, we need to build up that bearing capacity. So, let's head on back to the studio. We'll pull out some wall framing. We'll pull out some photos and we'll continue that discussion. We'll fire up that brand new Video board and uh we'll get after it.

[00:04:22]So, I'll see you back at the studio.

[00:04:26]All right, so we're back in studio. We got the Vibe board fired up. You know, you're watching the Build Show Network and of course got Steve Basic Architect here. And uh hopefully you enjoyed that little trip out on the site there talking a little bit about pocket headers. I love these things. Again, it's a small detail, small part of the hole, but I think it works extremely well. Um, everybody that I've worked with, structural engineer likes it, um, approves it. Our insulators love it. Framers love it. So, let's talk about why you should love it.

[00:05:06]All right, so here we go. Floor framing plan starts there, right? Let's bring this over.

[00:05:14]We'll just bring this up a little. And you can see here we have a header there.

[00:05:21]We have a header there. We have a header there. And we have a header all along there. Now, this one is called out as header A, header A, header A, header B, and it's B through here, but it's all basically one. Um, so we're not playing a game of ABBA either.

[00:05:47]Um, but there's a very distinct difference between header A and header B. A lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, these are openings that are probably somewhere around 3 feet or 32 in, right? These are smaller, but when we get here, these are much larger, right? These are on the order of like 60 in up there. So, almost twice the size of some of these cuz I think this one, these in the bedroom here, these were only 32 in. So, yeah. So it increases.

[00:06:23]So why is that header differently?

[00:06:25]Obviously there's a different loading condition, right? The farther or the bigger the span is, the bigger the beam has to be. And so if I have a column here and a column here, let's move this over a little so you can see it. All right.

[00:06:44]And I put a beam in here.

[00:06:49]All right. as a header.

[00:06:51]But if I make that opening a little bigger, the header has to be bigger. So you can do that a number of ways, right?

[00:07:02]I can make the depth deeper or I can make the number of plies more.

[00:07:15]Right? So, or I can go just from a say 2x10 to an LVL and gain strength by the material choice itself. But if I'm talking strictly that this was already an LVL, I can either make it deeper or I can add plies to it. But at some point, I might run out of plies and I won't be able to do that. And so I am forced to go deeper. Right? So let's talk about that. If we come over here, we have A's and B's. Well, if we go up to my handy dandy header schedule, and these are on all of our drawings, you will see, we'll zoom this up here.

[00:08:05]You will see that header A calls for one 9 and 1/2 in lvl. And then we have our head plate. So we have one inch, one lvl, and then that gives us I don't know, I got to do the math. Um, you know, three and 5/8 maybe of uh a little over 3 and 1/2 in of space for insulation. Now header B, we just simply increased the number of plies and we went to two, but this 9 and 1/2 stayed the same. And then you can see we call for cripples on the flat. The head plate here, the head plate is so that we have something to nail trim to. We're going to go through I grabbed a couple photos.

[00:08:51]We'll talk about that in the photo. But header C, you can see yes, we fill it in. It's three ply. But now we're maxed out at that 9 and 1/2 in depth. So, we do have some here where we can go to a deeper member and we will drop one of the top plates over that header. And then we'll make up for it with a little 5/8 inch full blocking underneath. And then of course we have the two ply at 11 and 7/8.

[00:09:29]And of course we have the three ply at 11 and 78. So these six headers A through F pretty much solve for most conditions.

[00:09:40]Now we do have some occasions where we're going to have uh lift and slide doors very um temperamental to deflection above to their operation and those you know an 18footer 3 11 and 78 might not be enough to um support that. So we have to come up with other means. But then we get into a very customized header. These are for more of our commodity headers as we march through the building. And you can see the A's, B's, they all are certainly covered there nice and easy. Um let's take a look. So here this is our typical um a header right and that is one inch and 3/4 by 9 and 1/2. The other thing that I like to do in keeping these all say that 9 and 1/2 in dimension or if we had to move to that 11 78 taking the plate out.

[00:10:48]But notice all of my headers are pushed up tight to the top plate. So in an 8ft wall that's going to give us a 6' 11 rough opening. And in a 9 ft wall it'll obviously give us a 7 ft 11 in rough opening to play with there. So, by pushing that all the way up, it makes it a very common experience for the framers that they're not sitting there trying to measure exactly where this head plate is. They basically push the header up and then nail the plate to the bottom.

[00:11:23]Now, notice here, here's that 2x4 on the flat, and that's basically just a drywall catch, right? Do we need them?

[00:11:33]We don't typically need them because the distance from here to there is, you know, probably somewhere around 10 and 1/2 in where the distance from here to there is 16. So, we actually um can make up for that uh drywall there. The only issue that these would help is if in fact you had a joint in the drywall, a butt joint there that was going to happen. And if that wasn't there, then you'd have that kind of floating joint.

[00:12:06]So that's why we put them in. Now, why do we do pocket headers? Well, the beauty of the pocket header is at some point I'm going to fill this with insulation.

[00:12:19]And for years, you know, we used to build headers where we would say, "Hey, use this and then put a piece of rigid insulation in there and then have another, you know, LVL." But now the framer is playing around with um rigid insulation stuff that they don't want to play around with. Right? Framers want to cut wood. Framers want to nail wood. Framers want to lift and carry wood. Right?

[00:12:45]That's what framers do. They don't want to mess around with rigid insulation.

[00:12:48]They will if they have to, but they don't want to. So my pocket header idea is if I leave that pocket exposed to the inside, it's a slightly shallower cavity than say what's happening over there. But the fact is that the insulators get to do what the insulators do when the insulators do it. So there's no change in their sequence or in what they have to do. The framers get to frame when they are framing and there is no sequential change or material change to what they do. Um, so everybody remains real happy. everybody stays on the same schedule that they've always been on, the one that they're very happy with, and the insulators come and they insulate when the insulators do, right? So, it makes for a very easy um and acceptable solution to the framers and the insulators, right?

[00:14:01]Everybody's happy with this situation.

[00:14:04]We're going to move here. Now, couple things on this one that I wanted to point out. This one is for a door, but there's a slight difference from this and the previous photo. Even though this is a one ply, and we still have the 2x4s, and we have that insulation space there and there.

[00:14:26]What's different here is notice we have double jacks on both sides.

[00:14:33]And so in our um header schedule, when the width of this is greater than 3 ft, we move to double jacks. And why is that? Right? So the science behind that is that you could sit there and calculate whether we actually need it on every window but rather than that we just put the node in and we'll add the extra jack. But the science behind it is such that if we do a single jack, that single jack has an inch and a half by 5 and 1/2 in, right?

[00:15:15]So that's what maybe I don't know, let's just say 9 square in. I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm I'm guessing there, educated guess, right? that nine square inches, but that LVL only occupies an inch and 3/4 of it. So, it's really only occupying about three square inches of bearing. Now, depending on the loading condition, all of these joists are bringing in load to the header. The header is splitting that load and taking it down here. And then the jack is reacting to it, right? And that's what makes the building stand up.

[00:16:00]But that 3 in might not be quite enough of bearing area for that load. And so we need to increase it. So by putting the second jack under there, that three inches now becomes six inches of bearing area and twice. And so for the headers over 3 ft, we increase that bearing area. Right? So that's what's happening there. Last photo here is this is those larger openings and you can see we have our double jacks there and we have couple in there and a couple in there and this is one continuous header but notice this is a two ply. So you can see there's just a little bit of space in there. Um but we could still get 2 in of insulation in that pocket. And remember on the outside of this we have R9, right? So we're going to be in the R18ish range or more, you know, somewhere between 18 and say 22ish or so in that cavity depending on what insulation we um put inside that pocket header. But even on these larger openings and moving to a TLY, we still get that space in there for insulation.

[00:17:32]So anyways, pocket headers, I love them. We use them on every project. Um, and uh, you know, framers, insulators, everybody's real happy with them. So, yeah, you got it. I'm Steve Basic Architect. This is my vibe board. Yeah, hopefully you're enjoying that vibe board. Um, I think it's a game changer for my videos. allows me to bring up photos and drawings and such and mark them up, chat chat about them. Um, have a really great indepth discussion with you. Of course, you're watching the build show where yeah, there's thousands of videos there and you know it free, right? We got 14 contributors throwing up videos there. We have editors working round the clock for you guys that uh make all of us editors. Listen, don't ever go and meet any of us in person cuz it's going to be a total let down. Our editors do such a great job in making us look good. It's kind of that old adage, you never want to meet your hero. So yeah, if you see me walking down the street, don't come up to me.

[00:18:47]You don't want to meet me. You don't.

[00:18:49]Trust me. Live in the world, the editing world. They make me look so much better.

[00:18:54]So anyways, if you're looking for more, yeah, you know it. You can find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tik Tok, and of course YouTube. Follow me, subscribe to my channel, whatever it takes. I'm putting up information all the time. I love to share information.

[00:19:12]Um, I was mentored by a gentleman who his number one um idea or concept about information was that we don't own it. We're curators of it and we should be sharing it every minute we get. So I uh live up to his mentorship and uh I share that information freely and it forces me to press on. Right? If I give up some information then I have to look beyond it because you're looking to me to bring you the next best thing. So I'm trying and we're figuring it out slowly but surely. But we all need to share it. So, if you're on any of those platforms, make sure that you're putting up information so I get to check it out and um have a discussion with you about what you're doing and how you're doing it and why we might want to change or why I might need to adopt that information.

[00:20:08]So, anyways, go do it. I'm Steve Basic Architect.

[00:20:13]This is the build show. You just watched an exceptional video on pocket headers.

[00:20:22]Until next time, long live our buildings.