How to Frame House Windows

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson. I'm going to talk to you about how to frame for house windows. What I'm going to use, I'm going to use these blocks. And, well, we'll have these approximated that these will be our two by fours that we'd actually use in the construction. And, this will be the top of the window up here, and this will be the bottom of the window down here. So what we would do is we'd set up these two by fours when we start building our window. Now the first thing we gotta do is we gotta check the specifications on our window, so you need to determine what type window that you're going to be using in each area of your room prior to actually building your window openings. And what you need to get off those specifications are what the rough opening needs to be. And that's going to determine what the inside, side to side and top to bottom dimensions are going to be. Then we get into the actual type of construction. On each side of your window, you're going to have two two by fours. And this inside one is actually going to be off-set like this, on both sides. And what that allows for, is that whenever you have an extended opening in your wall, where you don't have your studs, in order to be able to support the weight of either the roof or a second floor, then you need to have what we call a 'header'. Now a header will actually typically be something, could be as small as a two by six. It might be a two by eight, or even a two by ten. And what we do, if these will be, say, our two by eights, we would shim these out, because a stud is three and a half inches, where a regular two by four is about one and a half inches. So you'd have to add a half inch of material in between your header. And this is essentially what a header would look like. So it'd have a shim, so that the thickness of the header would be three and a half inches. And then what that would do is we would build that in. That goes over the top of the window, and then your two outside studs, and it would sit on the two inside studs like this. And then in the bottom, you would essentially have a stud that would go across here. And then you'd continue on below the window with your typical framing for the house. So you may have a frame that comes down underneath your window sill, like this. So, this is what your opening would look like. You'd have two two by fours on each side of the window. Single two by four on the bottom, with whatever your existing two by four bracing is. And then with this larger header. So I'm Tim Gipson with constructing the window opening."