It seems that the framing is becoming more and more time consuming. It took me two weeks to finish my first soffit. What's taking so long? Let's break down what goes into framing in some duct work.
The soffit starts simply enough. Just build a "short" wall that is 10.5 inches high, and spans the length of the area to be covered. In this case the length was about 19 feet, so I built two section. One 10 feet long, the other 9. And of course this is repeated for both sides of the duct work.
Since I'm working alone, I found the best way to secure the "short" walls to the joists was to prop one end up within the 2x4's in the walls, and temporarilly support the other end with clamps. I would then drill out and drive wood screws into each of the joists that the soffit came into contact with.
Next comes the second half of the "short" wall. This time I had to first cut a small hole in my existing drywall, and build a short section that would extend into the 2x4 already within the wall. The picture on the left shows this.
The entire process was then repeated on the other side of the duct work, so that I ended up with "short" walls on either sides of the ducts.
At this point I have to mention that a week had already gone by since I started this part of the framing. During the week I only have about 2 hours a night than I can work (since my saw is right under our bedroom). It would basically take one evening for each "short" wall section. I usually relax Friday nights, so Voila! There goes a week already.
Since my weekend turned out to be rather busy, I only managed to buy more wood for the underside of the soffit. The following week I would continue building.
I started by screwing 2x2's to the bottom outer edge of the "short" walls. Next, I screwed in 2x4's flat, to the inside of the 2x2's. This way I had a nice finish for when I hand the drywall. Finally, I ran another line of 2x2's down the center of the flat-laying 2x4's to stiffen them up.
It all sounds simple enough, so then, what's the hold up? Since the nail gun I have would have split the smaller 2x2's I was using I decided to use wood screws. However, I couldn't just drive the screw into the wood or I would twist the screw heads right off (believe me, I tried). So for each flat-laying 2x4 (16 of them), I ended up drilling and driving 10 screws. Two on each end from the side, two on each end from the bottom, and two into the center 2x2. It may sound like overkill, but it really stiffened up the whole structure so that I shouldn't have to worry about the drywall cracking.
In addition, keep in mind that all of this work was usually directly over my head. Not only that, but I usually had to climb up and down a chair just to be able to reach. Even if I averaged only 5 times per flat-laying 2x4's, that's still 80 trips. To make a long story short, there went another week.
