The importance of order of operations hit home this week for my husband and I. We have begun the long process of finishing our unfinished basement. I’ve seen my father do it to the homes I grew up in, my husband had seen and helped his father, but neither of us have actually ever done this ourselves.

Thank goodness for YouTube!

My husband is also a smart, engineering-perfectionist, so I had every confidence the basement would be done well when we finished. We decide the best thing in this framing process would be to tackle the hardest wall in the room. My husband takes his sweet time, calculating every angle and measurement we need, going over YouTube videos until I’m pretty darn sure I could build the wall myself. We lay the boards together on the floor using the framing-nail gun to put it all together. It looks like absolute perfection on the floor, then we lift it into place, and it fits perfectly. I go to bed that night fist-bumping everyone in the house, thinking we so got this framing business down.

However, with the light of day, we realized by putting the hardest wall in first, we no longer had enough space on the floor with which to build two much easier walls. After what we’d been through the night before, neither of us wanted to take the harder wall down, so we built what should have been easy walls board-by-board, placing them upright against the wall between a top and bottom plate. Keeping everything level was such a bugger, it made those easy walls seem even harder than first wall we put in. It’s a lesson I don’t mind sharing with others, when framing, maintaining floor space is paramount. 🙂