The thing I see pulled out of a wall more than anything else is a towel bar.

Not framing. Not a beam. A towel bar. Somebody hangs a wet towel on it every day for two years and one morning it comes off in their hand with two chunks of drywall still attached to it.

Nobody calls that a construction defect. It is a thirty dollar towel bar. But it is the visible version of a decision that got made, or did not get made, back when the walls were still open.

That decision is blocking.

Scrap lumber or plywood screwed flat between the studs before the drywall goes on. That is the whole thing.

No permit, no engineer, and on most jobs no change order, because your framer already has the material on site and the offcuts are headed for the dumpster anyway.

What it buys you is a wall you can put a screw into anywhere inside that panel instead of hunting for a stud that is not where you need it.

When I tell somebody to block with a 2x10, I get the same answer almost every time. A 2x10? For a toilet paper holder? Who is going to yank on it that hard?

Nobody. That is not what the 2x10 is for.

It is not about strength. A 2x4 is plenty strong enough to hold a towel bar, a toilet paper holder, or a mirror. Strength was never the problem.

It is about how much vertical target you get.

A 2x4 laid flat gives you three and a half inches of height in the wall. A 2x10 gives you nine and a quarter.

Here is why that is the whole ballgame. Your framer blocks for the toilet paper holder and centers a 2x4 at the height that was on the plan. Then the tile goes down a little thicker than anybody figured, or the vanity lands and somebody stands there looking at it and wants that holder three inches higher.

On a 2x4 you just missed it. The blocking is sitting in the wall doing absolutely nothing and you are back to a plastic anchor in drywall.

On a 2x10 you are still in it.

You are not buying strength. You are buying the room to change your mind later, which is the thing you always end up needing and never plan for. A 2x8 is the floor. A 2x10 is better. On a wall where you are genuinely not sure yet, plywood the whole section.

Most people will tell you to block a TV wall because TVs are heavy. That is not really true anymore. TVs have gotten dramatically lighter even as they got bigger, and most mounts are built to span two studs.

Blocking a TV wall is about placement, not weight.

With blocking you put the TV exactly where it belongs in the room. Without it, the TV goes where the studs are, and those are two different spots more often than not.

There is a second thing. When somebody cannot find dead center of a stud, they run a big lag bolt in anyway and catch the edge of it. It looks fine. It holds. It is nowhere near as secure as it should be and nobody will ever know until it is not fine.

Grab bars.

Nobody puts grab bars on the plan for a brand new custom home, because the person building it is not thinking about needing one. I get it.

Here is the thing. You are not blocking for you today. You are blocking for the version of this house where a parent moves in, or somebody has a knee replaced, or you are seventy and you still want to live here. Blocking is invisible. Nobody walking through knows it is there. The bar goes up the day somebody needs it and comes off the day they do not.

Block the shower walls and behind the toilet, and go tall so the final height is not decided today by a framer.

The reason this one is different from the rest is what it costs to fix. Everywhere else in the house you are cutting open drywall and patching. In a tiled shower you are pulling tile off the wall and trying to match it, which you will not, or you are hanging a grab bar into nothing and calling it a grab bar. A bar anchored in drywall is not a grab bar. It is a thing to fall with.

Nobody drew it, so nobody bid it, and the framer who adds it is bidding higher than the framer who does not.

It is also the easiest thing in the house to miss on a walkthrough, because there is nothing to look at. A blocked wall and an unblocked wall look exactly the same from four feet away, and they look exactly the same forever once the drywall is on.

Which is the entire reason you have to say it out loud before insulation.

Blocking, whole house

Now, before drywall: roughly $60 in material and an hour or two of a framer's time. On most jobs this is a conversation, not a change order.

After drywall: cut the wall open, add the backing, patch, tape, texture, paint. Call it $400 to $1,500 per location once you count the paint never quite matching.

In a tiled shower, after the fact: pulling and resetting tile you cannot match. This is the one that is effectively unfixable, which is why it is the one to get right.

Before insulation, standing in the framed house with whoever runs the crew:

"Can we walk the house and mark the walls I want blocked? I want 2x10, not 2x4."

That sentence does three things. It makes the list yours instead of their upsell, it takes about twenty minutes, and it turns a vague request into marker on the studs that the drywall crew can actually see.

And when somebody on that crew tells you a 2x10 is overkill, because they will:

"It is not for strength. It is so I still hit it if the final height moves."

That is the whole argument, and it ends it.

This one decides what I write next. If you are three weeks from drywall I am writing you a different issue than if you are still picking finishes.

If you know somebody whose house is framed right now, forward this to them today. Their blocking window closes the morning the insulators show up, and there is nobody on that job whose job it is to bring it up.

And starting this week you get something for it. If one person signs up off your link, I will send you the full cost breakdown of the first house I ever built. Every line I tracked, 2017 prices, which are going to hurt to look at. It is not for sale and it never has been.

That is it for this week.

Hit reply and tell me one wall you are not sure about. Give me the room and what you want to hang on it and I will tell you what to block and how tall. I answer these myself.

Jon | Built With This