The Horner House Project: The Bungalow Structural Resolution

The next day we jumped right in and got the other everything finished up. The first thing we did was to attach two boards flat side up to the floor joists parallel to the old “beam” that was under the original back wall of the house. In the same was we added the shorter board at the front of the basement this is to add stability to that “beam” and help distribute the load.

I couldn't get one picture of the added board, so here are two.

After that we put together two of the jacks to use as temporary supports while were raising the new beams into place. By this time my brother, Jim, had arrived and we were all VERY thankful for his help. That beam is heavy!!!

The bricks are in place and the beam and post are waiting to go up. We added the bricks so that the wood posts would not absorb any water from the floor, which will extend their life and prevent a possible mold problem.

The green post was put in under the original "beam" when the house was moved. Here Dad and Eric had put the post in place and were deciding how to stabilize the post while getting the beam up. With the house now resting on it, it's going nowhere, but it was a process.

The two center jacks were used to help keep the beam raised while attaching it to the posts and to make sure that the beam was up against the floor joists. We also kept these in place while nailing the beam to said joists.

Beam is in place and good for a long time. Now we need to clean up the mess.

With Jim’s help the construction of the second beam went much more quickly. And, the raising and installing of it went more quickly as it was the second one we did. It also helped that we used a jack under one end. Also, the placement of this beam was important. It ends under the old “beam” that held up the back wall giving additional stability and strength to that “beam” as well.

Second beam in place!

It's not very obvious in the above picture due to the angle, but here you can see that the joists are not attached to the post at the same height. We believe this is due to the cement floor being very uneven. (Also visible in this picture is the jack that was in place temporarily while during the process.

The last thing we did was add three additional posts under the original “beam” that was under the back wall. This combined with the support board will take care of that part of the house. We could have easily raised a beam there as well which would have had less posts or jacks littering the basement, but we felt it was a reasonable tradeoff as this was quicker and cheaper, and a beam can always be added in the future if we find the jacks to be in our way.

Here are the jacks that we added. As you can see there are several.

On a final note, there was one jack that was in place prior to our work that was loose before and actually fell down while we were doing this work. At one time, one corner of the kitchen had been turned into a bathroom and this post was added to help support the additional weight. As it was not necessary any longer, so wasn’t a problem.