projects on the go
I, Floyd, and Dave are back at it again. We are removing the north retaining wall to get at a notched rotten beam. This means shovelling more dirt, removing bits and pieces of retaining wall and three posts, and hauling out buckets of dirt. Now you see it, …
… now you don’t.
We found, upon trying to build 2×6 fire-rated load-bearing walls, that there was nothing to set the walls upon. The floor is rotten. I’ll have to dig deeper, tearing up the floorboards, to see how far the rot goes.
In the mean time, we put up the 2nd wall (a 2×6 wall). It was moved from its original spot about 9 inches to the west to be placed under (not beside) 1st storey ceiling / 2nd storey floor joists. Well that’s a novel idea, eh?, supporting overhead joists with load-bearing walls! Can you hear the annoyance in my typing?
I had some time today, so I thought I’d putter. I cleaned up the place a little, added some electrical boxes to the living room / bath wall, and … I forget what else.
Oh, right – I properly mounted the brake / tail lights to the flatbed trailer. I got these from Princess Auto.
Since these brake lights don’t hang down like the other ones do, they are less likely to break while backing into places like the landfill.
We filled the hole that the furnace people drilled in my floor.
The headers await support.
Supports almost ready.
When they (whomever they are) put the add-on to increase the bathroom and living room sizes, they not only didn’t level the house first but they also didn’t put in the right size of support holding up the double 2×10 headers supporting the rest of the house above. It was 1.5 inches too short, making it extremely obvious above in the 2nd floor suite.
So most of today was dedicated to engineering a new support system and taking out the old.
telepost in bathroom
We had to cut the copper water lines to the vanity (bathroom sink) a few days ago to access the nuts holding the living room / bathroom add-on sill plates to the footings. Now we have no water.
“What, you didn’t reconnect them?”
No. I have another plan. I want to replace all the copper with PEX. Every time we add or move a beam in the basement, some change must be made to the water lines. I’m really not great at soldering copper. My solders look like a kindergarten kid tried to do it. Yes, I’ve gotten better, but the rat’s nest of copper pipes is already an altered patchwork of lines without a cohesive plan.
Today is the day we finally put in the 1F ceiling / 2F floor joists.
First, remove the nails.
Adding the 20′ (6.096m) 2×8 took some planning. The house was not exact in its measurements. We propped the 2×8 up with some ladders and moved it into place. We had to plane the end of it down three times to get it to fit between the ribbon ledger and the subfloor, stuffed alongside the balloon stud.
We finally got it in.
Now that the corner of the house is more-or-less shored up, we can begin in the main floor.
We ripped the 2×10 20′ (6.096m) today. It is the longest rip I’ve ever done. Everything else has been 16′ (4.8768m). I had to buy 2x10s as the 2x8s in this house are 8 9/16″, and ordinary 2x8s are 8 1/4″. They would be either too short or not tall enough. (What?) What I mean is, it would either miss the subfloor above or the drywall below. So we rip.
The old floor joists in the original staircase location back when it was a 4-square house have been taken out. They were a mish-mash of pieces added as time went on. When we repaired the 2nd floor landing a few months back, we, yet again, pieced some pieces in. I regret that now. They should all have been replaced by real joists, ones that run the maximum span possible, from balloon stud to stair header.
It has been a sore spot in this house for ages. The NE corner of the house has been cleared of all the concrete they poured. It looks like they only did it as a stop-gap measure to prevent further house slumping. It didn’t work! Instead, this giant chunk of concrete, weighing probably 400 lbs (180kg), was being held up by the house.
Now that that has been removed, along with all the bricks in the bathroom wall (eastern part of north wall), the corner of the house is considerably lighter. I reckon to weight to be somewhere around 1000 lbs (450kg). Because of this, we are now able to remove the old, rotten beam install the beam in that corner. It spans 10′ (3m) and will have three teleposts.
This is what the concrete looks like now, one day after it was poured.
