Posts Tagged ‘jack’

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Straightening things up.

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.

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

Studley.

It has been a while since an update but much has happened at the house. As you can see in the photo, we’ve got the entire front upstairs gutted down to the studs. Since those two existing front rooms will be combined there are a few things that need to be done to make that happen:

Once the tenants leave downstairs we will shut down/drain the heating system and remove the baseboard heat in the old kitchen and cap the pipes.

Whoever created the kitchen upstairs removed a rather large portion of a load bearing wall and caused about a 1 inch sag in the top beam. We could leave it as is since most likely, the roof load has settled and there wouldn’t be any more movement. But, y’know, you gotta do it right. So we are going to jack up the top beam and run about a 15 foot microlam header all the way across. This will also allow us to open up the wall downstairs and to pass the load down down around both openings and into support posts in the basement.

Once the header is in place, the entry wall will be re-built and the old seperating wall removed (the one that Rachel was seen kicking down). Then, a new radiator will go in place of the baseboard heat.

In the meantime, there is quite a bit of carpentry and electrical work to do. Onward and forward.