Drywall Contractor in Van Nuys, CA

Van Nuys Airport sits on roughly 730 acres in the middle of the Valley and hosts more than one hundred businesses, averaging close to 400,000 takeoffs and landings a year as one of the busiest general aviation fields anywhere. Los Angeles World Airports puts its annual contribution to the regional economy at about two billion dollars supporting more than ten thousand jobs. The building stock that serves it is our bread and butter here, meaning hangar offices, maintenance shops, flight school classrooms and parts storage. That work is almost entirely light gauge steel framing inside big open shells, with partitions that have to stand tall, stay straight and take abuse.

Tall wall framing inside a warehouse is a different calculation from framing a house. A partition running eighteen or twenty two feet to an open deck needs the stud gauge and depth chosen for the actual height and the load, not for convenience, and it needs a top connection that lets the roof structure move without loading the wall. Slotted deflection track handles that, and getting the fastening right at the head is the difference between a wall that stands quietly for twenty years and one that cracks along the top every winter. In racked and forklift served spaces we specify impact resistant board on the lower portion of the wall, because ordinary board there is a maintenance line item.

The Civic Center and the surrounding professional buildings generate a steady flow of tenant improvement work, and those projects are governed by rated assemblies. Corridor walls, occupancy separations, shaft enclosures and area separation walls all have listed constructions that specify board type, stud gauge, fastener pattern and penetration treatment. Fire caulking and rated penetration details at every conduit, duct and pipe are the parts most likely to be caught at final inspection, so we treat them as part of the framing scope rather than as cleanup. Government tenants also tend to require phased work in occupied buildings, which we schedule around business hours.

The seismic history here is not abstract. The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake struck on the morning of January 17, 1994 on a previously unmapped blind thrust fault, with its epicenter in Reseda a few miles west of Van Nuys, and it damaged tens of thousands of buildings across the Valley. A great deal of the local apartment stock predates that event and predates the current standards for shear panel nailing, hold downs and connection hardware. When we open a wall in one of those buildings we look at the framing and the connections that are exposed, and we tell the owner what we see, because a repair that only replaces board leaves the actual condition in place.