Hello,
I’m framing my first house in beautiful northern Michigan, and I’m loving every second of it. I snapped chalk lines and marked where my anchor bolts were, but experienced a bit of a learning curve. Some of my sills have somewhat random 1/2″ holes in them, no more than 4 per 12′ sill. Is this a problem in any way?
Secondly, my sill bolts (which my concrete contractor installed) are relatively short to the point that I had to countersink with a 1.5″ forstner bit around the bolts about 5/8″ deep to fit the washer and nut. Is this a problem in any way?
Thirdly, a couple of my sills are cupping like crazy–maybe 5/8″ off the foundation in places. This is not helped by the fact that the anchor bolts are not centered and are typically 1.5-2″ from the interior edge of the sill. I have complete confidence that the weight of the building will iron this out no problem, but I’m concerned about the annoyance this will cause as I frame out the first floor assembly.
My perimeter is only 112 feet. I’m half considering cutting the anchor bolts and reinstalling all of the sills using Simpson Titen bolts. I feel like this would solve all of my problems for a couple hundred bucks, but I’m curious what more experienced builders think.
Replies
I'm not a builder, but I'm having a house built now and I've run into some of these issues.
Are these sill plates going onto basement foundation walls? If so, they might be involved in holding back lateral soil pressure from the backfill, so extra holes and countersinking too much could weaken them. If it's a "standard" house on a crawl space or slab, and if it doesn't have crazy wind loads and shear wall design, I wouldn't think a few small holes in the sill plate would matter much.
Countersinking sill plate washers is generally frowned upon (search the home inspector forums, they are 100% convinced it is always bad). However, I did run across a provision in the Minnesota building code that actually recommends countersinking them 1/4" to help resist soil pressure from backfilled basement walls (see footnote "d" in the attached image, and also see here: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/1309.0404/). But I think this might only work if you use 2" diameter washers like it says.
Either way, countersinking the sill plate washers 5/8" into a 1-1/2" plate seems less than ideal. I wouldn't rely on that connection, but I wouldn't necessarily cut that bolt off. Personally I'd still use it and just add another Titen HD near by.
Some of my anchor bolts were cast off-center. I'm still using the ones that aren't too far off, but I'm adding some Titen HD's as well. I think it's fine to use both (my engineer didn't have a problem with it) so I don't necessarily see a reason to cut off the cast in place anchors even if you want to add some Titen HDs.