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?
Why annoyed? Because the 2nd storey kind of needs to be supported, and the previous renovators didn’t. The joists were just kind of hanging there – 24 feet of wood, just hanging without being supported. Likely that wasn’t such a bad thing when there wasn’t such thing as building code or standards or even the hope that your house would last more than, say, 50 years. But … fast-forward 50+ years (as the last reno was likely done in the 1960s), and somebody has to fix it.
Back to the wall. It didn’t quite slide in. We needed three bottle jacks to lift the 2nd storey floor up about 1 3/8 inches. This now brings it on-level with the 1st storey floor. The 2nd storey still isn’t level. That will have to be done from the basement when we are able to get at a rotten beam.
In the mean time, we peeled back the linoleum to expose the floor. Save that for another day.
