The Bungalow Structural Resolution – Part 3

When I left off last time we were about half way through the day on Saturday and the going had been pretty slow. I returned from the hardware store with the posts and larger nails, but no jacks. But they had found that drilling a very small pilot hole helped to get the nails into the beam. It also helped to have one person, and even better two, stand on the beam while another person hammered in the nails with a four pound sledge hammer. (On a side note we are all very experienced with hammer work. It wasn’t just inexperience that was making things difficult.) A nail gun would have been nice. :)

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that we used screws to put the boards for the beams together and hold things in line while hammering them together. Unfortunately they broke a bunch of the screw driver bits just after I got back and we only had a few left. They were cheap bits, but it still left us short.

Knowing that we needed help to raise the beam we stepped away from that part of the project and hopped over to another item on the list. There are two places that we nailed boards, flat side, to the floor joist just to give things some extra support. This causes any force and weight acting on the floor to be spread to several floor joists rather than a single one.

Eric and Dad cutting the short board needed for support.

The brown line is the board we added and the yellow line is a gas pipe. This kept us from extending the board all the way to the front wall.

A slightly blurry picture of the gas pipe (surrounded in red) and the water line (surrounded in green) that were somewhat in the way.

This picture shows the new board place close to the old "beam." The white area of the "beam" is actually the end of one board and the beginning of another. The main beam that we are added will run along the right side of the old "beam." While our board is short it does help disperse the force placed on the old "beam" in this weak area.

The wood posts still needed to be unloaded and taken to the basement so we did that too.

 This post is 6"x6". Plenty stout for our needs. And it's a great shot of my feet!

Here's the post on the stairs. Eric and Dad were good to go, but the post needed a rest.

The post is finally down close to it's new home.

There was still much work to be done, but Eric and Dad were ready to call it a day, so they locked up and set the alarms and headed home. Meanwhile I headed to a new hardware store to find the proper sized jacks and get more good quality drill bits and screwdriver bits. We didn’t get a far along as we had hoped, but we did walk away with a good plan for the next day.

-Amanda