#DRICORE SMART WALL WINDOWS#

If you don't have a mechanical room, the electrical panel will need to remain accessible for servicing, but there are clever ways to hide it. These lines can dictate the location or depth of your walls, or be treated separately with a soffit (their own framing) or be left exposed. When you decide to finish your basement, you'll realize what a maze of plumbing and ductwork your basement holds, often in the ceiling. Service Lines and Structural Supports: The finished walls will accommodate switches, outlets and plumbing access points that are installed at code-determined distances from the floor.In some areas of the country, naturally durable wood can replace this requirement, or metal framing materials can be used.

This treatment means we also require specialty fasteners that won't corrode under the chemical conditions of the wood. Any wood that does make contact with concrete (like the bottom plate) needs to be treated to resist moisture and microbial growth.

As you'll see later, basement walls are constructed a couple of inches in front of the foundation wall to prevent unnecessary contact between wood framing materials and the foundation. As part of fire-blocking, the wall cavities are divided into smaller compartments with horizontal pieces of wood, and additional wood may be added to the top of the foundation wall behind the stud wall. A stud wall is traditionally constructed using 2x4 or 2圆 timbers and consists of bottom plates (horizontal boards attached to the floor), top plates (horizontal boards attached to the ceiling joists) and vertical studs affixed to both plates.

#DRICORE SMART WALL WINDOWS#

Framing: Framing is the skeleton of a finished wall, serving as support for other aspects of the wall, like windows and the drywall surface layer, and as housing for more insulation, electrical boxes and plumbing lines.

Aside from preventing heat escape, proper air sealing and certain types of insulation also are part of fire-blocking, the code-required techniques to slow the spread of fire within concealed spaces. Additionally, any wire, pipe and duct penetrations are sealed to prevent air leaks with noncombustible caulk or spray foam, depending on the gap size. Insulation materials are used against the foundation, within wall cavities and at the sill plate and rim joists (the bottom and top of the wall). Framed basement walls often use a combination of insulation. The types of insulation used in basements include rigid foam panel boards, spray foam and conventional fiberglass or mineral fiber batt insulation (the blanket stuff), sometimes with facing or wrapping. A finished basement wall will have a code-determined R-value - a measure of its ability to resist heat escape - and insulation will be used to reach this goal.

Insulation and Sealing: Wall insulation serves a few crucial purposes: it's a vapor and air barrier, controlling the temperature in the space and providing sound dampening.

The category of stand-alone vapor barrier for finished walls is usually a membrane or sheet of plastic but, as you'll see later, other finished wall components have vapor barriers built in or act as barriers themselves. Second, but less recognized, we need to prevent the moisture from interior spaces from migrating into our finished wall. First, concrete is porous and even with good drainage, water in the soil against the foundation wall will do its darndest to move to drier areas inside. And it does this important work twofold in basement wall finishing.

Vapor and Moisture Barriers: Used interchangeably, The Department of Energy defines a vapor or moisture barrier as 'a material that reduces the rate at which water vapor can move through a material.' As such, this component is really a rolling roadblock that handles moisture instead of preventing it entirely.

Dricore smart wall