A lesson on the proper use of Spackers

At this point you are probably wondering “What on earth is a spacker?” I can’t say I blame you. Four short months ago I had no idea myself. Well allow me to enlighten you.

A spacker is a short piece of 1 x 4 strapping that you use to measure the correct distance between each row when putting on strapping for the roof or siding. You cut the spacker so that you can put it against the previous row of strapping, and put the next row of strapping on top of the spacker, so that the two rows of strapping are 16” on centre. On a two man (or woman) team, you each have a spacker, and before you nail in the next row of strapping, you each take your spacker and put it on an end of the piece of strapping to get the distance right across the whole length of the row.

The crew that we’ve hired to do the siding clearly has no understanding of the proper use of spackers. Using our spackers, Erick and I strapped the west side of the house, and as you can see from the photo above, the strapping is perfectly parallel and straight, and each row is the same distance apart. When we look at the strapping put on by our crew, it’s evident they didn’t use spackers as the strapping doesn’t look straight, and the distance between successive rows is variable. However, since the strapping is going to be covered by the siding, it really makes no difference from a structural point of view.

One more note about spackers. Since when you’re putting on strapping, you’re constantly making cuts, there will be all kinds of pieces of strapping of various lengths lying around looking just like a spacker, it just makes good sense to label your spacker for what it is, by writing SPACKER on it. And of course since you each have a spacker, you’ll want to differentiate between your spacker and your partner’s spacker. At this point you may be tempted to write SPACKER on one and SPACER on the other.

Our introduction to spacers occurred when Wayne and Jarret were strapping our roof in preparation for the metal. They had made two spacers to use, and had labeled on SPACER and the other one SPACKER. I’m assuming they did it so they’d know whose was whose, (not that it matters from a practical perspective, but it would certainly prevent your partner from stealing your spacer and claiming it as his own). Either that or they’re terrible spellers. Either way, the name stuck and at the Burley compound spacers were thereafter known as ‘spackers’. Which of course, when combined with the handy length of a spacer, led to all sorts of jokes about being “spacked”. We like to keep things mature on the Burley compound.

On a side note, here is what the kitchen looked like after we framed it in. We had to do this so that we could hang the kitchen cabinets off the studs. Soon this will be covered in drywall and you won't be able to see the pine at all. I'd like to note that no pine was injured in the framing of the kitchen. Although some of the beams were, slightly.