Mother and Daughter Build a Wall!

3 Materials
$150
5 Days
Advanced
We built a wall! Specifically, a non-load bearing partition wall in my garage. It's part of the makeover of my garage that was built to hide all my storage stuff.

Never in my life did I ever imagine myself building a wall, but here in my sixties, I've just helped build one! It's very gratifying to have researched how to build a wall, participate in the planning and building and then to see that the finished wall is strong, plumb, and in NO danger of falling over! Yes!

Below and in the video, we share our little wall building adventure. You may have a space in your home that you want to divide and have been putting off thinking you can't do this, but perhaps you can!

Growing up, my parents walled off a strip of our living room to provide a bedroom for me. I loved that little tiny room. The wall was temporary and came down when all of us left the nest.
Take a quick look at the video as it will show all the details of the build. Find additional details on our website.
BEFORE! This storage area is what we wanted to hide with the wall. Everyone has stuff they must store, but who wants to look at all of that every day?
This is our plan. Two top plates, one on the floor, and (8) 2x4 studs all held together with stud plate ties.
After determining the location of the bottom plate we cut out the width of the 2x4, plus the width of the backing board from the baseboard so that the board would sit flush to the existing wall. There is a wall stud right there that we nailed our new wall into for stability and strength.
The bottom plate was secured to the concrete floor with Tapcon concrete anchors. We first drilled holes using a rotary hammer and then drilled in the screws with an impact driver.
This build really didn't need two top plates, but we did that so we didn't have to buy 2x4s longer than 8' and then have to cut the studs to size. The 8' ones we bought fit perfectly.
The first stud was attached to the existing one in the wall. A level assured us everything was nice and straight.
After the first stud was set into place it was easy to put the others in place, because we marked the stud placement on the top and bottom plates prior to putting those into place.
We used these stud plate ties to connect the studs to the top and bottom. If we had more skill and strength, we could have used the traditional toenailing method to connect the studs. The pneumatic palm nailer made it extremely easy to drive the nails into the plate ties, but you could also use a hammer.
We purchased this very thin underlayment material to use on the back of the wall. We cut it to size and used a brad nailer to put it into place.
See that red line? That laser level line showed us exactly where the studs were so we could brad nail with confidence knowing the nail was going into the stud.
All done! We decided not to cover the front. We wanted to leave it open so we could use it as a demonstration wall in future videos. Everyone always talks about studs, but do you really know what and where they are in the wall? Leaving this open you can see exactly what one looks like.
Note, we also did some additional work in the attic but that is best explained via the video and blog post. So if you want to see why we had to go up in the attic, you can check out those resources.
All done! You'd never know there's a great big mess behind that wall!


This project had some steep learning curves in it. Prior to starting, we read lots of tutorials and viewed videos to determine the best course of action for this build. When you start reading tutorials, you find there are a lot of different ways to do things.


We took all the information we found and figured out how we could do this with our skills, strength and available tools. We did not need a permit to build our partition wall but always check in your area to see if permits are needed. 
For full details please video our website below!
Suggested materials:
  • 2x4s   (The Home Depot)
  • Simpson Stud Plate Ties   (Amazon)
  • Ridgid Palm Nailer   (Amazon)
Mother Daughter Projects
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Nia628 Nia628 on Feb 10, 2021

    This is very inspirational... will book mark this for when I get the nerve to final do this in my basement.

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