Have you ever been frustrated when trying to hang a shelf or that heavy picture and can’t figure out where the wall studs are located? Or maybe you’ve been concerned about driving a nail or screw into a water line or electric cable. Stud finders have come along way, but my little Stanley Magnetic stud finder that finds the drywall screws is still more accurate. All through the GarageDominium build I’ve had this crazy notion of using pictures to locate studs, piping and wiring before the sheetrock goes up. This is probably not a very novel idea, but certainly something I haven’t done before.
During all the house hunting we did prior to starting on the new house, we saw many homes listed online that had 3D online home tours that often included a “dollhouse” view of the floor plan. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could create a 3D walk through and a dollhouse view before sheetrock is installed? I did a lot of research and there is lots of software available for doing this. I downloaded some trial versions and started taking pictures. It didn’t work. My iPhone 8 just doesn’t have a good enough camera or processing capability. I don’t want to buy a new phone just for this purpose.
The alternative is to take static images and video. On July 2, U.W. and I went to the house and started snapping pics with my iPhone 8. We made a plan beforehand. First write the room name on paper. Then snap a picture of a paper. Now take a picture of room’s entry. Next, starting clockwise from the entry, work my way around the room taking pictures of the walls making sure to capture details about plumbing and electrical. After that, look up and take ceiling joist pictures. Finally take a series of short videos that pan around the room. Do this for every room. So that is what we did, and it work pretty well. It took several hours, and I had to recharge my phone twice. We still didn’t finish on the first day.
The neighborhood association had a July 4th celebration at the neighborhood park. We decided to go early and finish up our pictures before the party. While we had good pictures of the walls, we didn’t have any way to specifically locate wall studs or any way to determine the stud spacing. There are many places where the standard 16” stud spacing was not followed. Sometimes the spacing was less and sometimes more. The inspector made them add some studs where spacing was too great which created some really odd spacing on some walls. The solution was to take pictures of a tape measure against the wall. We didn’t do this for every wall, but for a lot of them.
In all we took over 1350 photos and videos. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but I never ran out of film! To organize all these images, I used the Apple Photos app to set up an album for each room. Then I put each album into a “framing” folder. Now it is easy to go the album for any room and see the framing details. It will be interesting to see if we can actually locate studs after the sheetrock is up.
Very well organized. Wouldn’t expect anything less.