OT - remodeling musings/ramble

Balloon Framing

Jim in Burlington On

>I've had every wall in my 1888 house down to the studs. I wonder wether they used balloon framing because of handtools or just didn't have any other method of framing homes. Every wall seems to have 18-20 foot clear pine studs and the ends have some that are 25 foot clear boards.

Re: Balloon Framing

Jack Guzman from Maine

>I'd like to know the answer to that myself. On a similar note,I replaced a floor{joists and all) in one room of an 1800s farmhouse. The room was 12'x28',a bedroom.The floor was built of logs ranging from 6" to 12" in diameter of varying species at 3' centers as joists,flattened on the top.(some still had bark on them)These were topped with two layers of 1" pine planks,some up to 24" wide.The joists had rotted,some broken and braced. I tried salvaging as much of this old pine as I could but the best piece couldn't be removed without cutting it.On the outside edge the builder had tied in the sills by spanning them with a 14" wide by 28' long pine plank.The walls were built on top of this so to remove it I had to cut it up.---Jack

Re: Balloon Framing

KenI

>Well I'm no expert, but since I just stumbled across this in the book I'm reading, I'll pass it along as unverified...

According to Michael Pollan in "A Place of My Own", balloon framing was a introduced in 1833 (St. Mary's Catholic Church, Chicago). He describes the technique as a response to the lack of local resources (large trees) and the need to grow the city quickly. Basically, with industrialization, it was faster to have a mill dice up a tree into sticks that a few men could nail together quickly, rather than try to haul trees a long distance to build a timber frame. He points out that timber framing required some seriously hazardous work by non-skilled people in order to raise the structure. Balloon frames reduced the risk to the labor and required fewer people at once.

He mentions that eventually kit homes were available via catalogs (Sears etc.) and that one company offered to "pay you a dollar for every knot you find in our houses." I bet the lumber in a house built today would look worse than their scrap pile.

There's more in the book, but that's the gist of it.

Ken

Those guys

jim reed @ tallahassee

>were building with solid lumber that approximated the size of plywood we get today. Wish I had that stuff.

Cheap junk...

Scott Burr in Ben Lomond CA

>Hey, my house was built in 1935 out of that cheap junk. Floors walls and ceilings. Even the floor joists down to the hand hewned posts.

My 1936 carpenter's reference manual

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>talks about three framing styles: balloon, modern braced (described as "an outgrowth of New England solid timber post and girth construction...[using] built-up members..."), and platform. The manual, by the way, is "Carpentry and Joinery Work," by Nelson L. Burbank, and was clearly written as a trade school textbook.

Audels' "Carpenters and Builders Library," copyrighted later (right after WWII as I recall), refers to the platform frame as "Western framing." At any rate, platform framing, in which each floor is built separately, is the standard today.

The illustrations in Burbank show rather graphically that balloon framing is a logical development from timber framing - for instance, the corner posts run all the way from foundation to rafter tails, just as with timber framing. Burbank makes the point that the platform frame is subject to the greatest shrinkage on drying of all three framing designs, with balloon framing having the least shrinkage.

So I suspect the answer was that it felt more logical to carpenters than other styles, as carpentry evolved away from the skill and material-intensive timber frame and took advantage of the increasingly inexpensive wire nail.

The original part of our house is balloon framed; the "low roof" portion, added after the war, is kind of platform framed, except where it was clearly framed by throwing pieces of wood at the building and nailing them where they hit.

Bill, who spent today replacing studs while trying not to damage siding, since it's probably more than $2/foot to replace, and who still can't figure out what's been keeping the roof from falling to the ground in that corner. The bottoms of the studs were so rotted out, there was all but nothing touching the plate.