This is an old house and of course everything is completely out of square. I’ve had moments of nausea if I stared too long at the floor and ceiling upstairs because they were both so crooked. So, I decided to try to straighten things up a bit.

Armed with a 4,000 pound lift capacity floor jack I slowly lifted the upstairs ceiling support beam back into place. Delirious with my success I moved downstairs to do the same to the beam supporting the upstairs floor. It didn’t even budge. So, I went to the auto-parts store and picked up a bottle jack that had a 40,000 pound (what are people lifting other than a house that they need 40,000lb capacity? ) lift capacity jack. That certainly did the trick. You can see in the bottom right-side photo the separation between the old studs and the newly shifted beam and in the middle photo the paint separation as the moulding desperately clung to the shifting ceiling. Both beams were moved nearly 2 inches and now the downstairs ceiling/upstairs floor are nearly perfectly level.