From almost the first time we were in the Bungalow it was apparent
that there was some sort of issue with the floors/structure. I assumed that it was just
that the house had settle over the years it had been there, but then we found
out that it has originally been built on the Northwest corner of English Avenue
and Emerson Avenue. In the 1950’s it was then moved to its current location, so some
sloping of the floors would not be unexpected. But, the floors also seemed to “bounce”
a bit when I walked through the living and dining rooms, so I determined that
the wisest course would be to ask the experts (our new contractor, Jacoby) what
they thought of it.
So, one day we headed down to the basement to take a look.
We hadn’t been down there for five minutes when Greg said that I had been right
to worry and we had a fairly significant problem. If this house were being
built today, the black lines in the following picture would be actual beams. As it is they are just 2x6’s laid flat and butted end to end. It’s nowhere
near enough support for this type of house, unless there are concrete walls underneath
them. When the house was moved there were a few jack posts put up, but that was
all.
If you could look through the first floor of the house, this is what you would see. The black lines are the "beams" and the green lines are the floor joists supported by the "beams." It's not to scale, but a close approximation.
Now, you might wonder why we never noticed this issue
ourselves. The reason for this was that when we purchased the house there were
walls that ran directly under the 2x6’s. They were not supporting anything, but simply obscuring the issue.
It’s not often I’m thankful for things
like broken ankles, but in this instance I am very thankful that Eric did break
his. It caused us to not be able to begin work on the Bungalow as rapidly as we
otherwise would have and with that and a couple of more recently broken windows
there ended up being mold issues in those walls. Because of this Dad and
Tristan (a friend’s son) had to remove those walls and by doing so they exposed
the problem. A very good thing for us, as I am going to begin holding the
family Thanksgiving and we have between forty and sixty people show up for
those!
We talked with Greg at Jacoby about what they would do to
make the fix and the ideal solution is to replace the 2x6’s with the proper
size and strength of beam. As can be seen in the pictures below, the thing that
complicates this is that the main beam runs through the mechanicals, so they
would need to be temporarily moved to complete this. And while Jacoby gave us an extremely
reasonable price for this work, we made the decision to use an alternate method and
do the work ourselves. The main reason for this is that all three of our houses
have work that needs to be completed ASAP
and with the additional medical bills I have incurred we need to stretch our
available funds much further than we had planned to.
These pictures were taken from approximately the middle of the basement, looking first towards the front wall, then the back. In the top picture, you can see that the "beam" (circled in red) is fairly accessible, and in the second, you can see that the "beam" runs directly over the furnaces. It stops just behind the stand pipe where it meets the other "beam" that runs crosswise.
The other complication brought on by this project was that
Greg recommended that we halt all work on the house until this was addressed.
We agreed that this was the more cautious approach and waited for Eric to do
the appropriate calculations before we began. After Eric looked things over and
created a plan, we headed to the hardware store Saturday morning to purchase
the needed materials…
As it is getting very late, and this is getting very long, we will leave off here for tonight and post more tomorrow.
-Amanda
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