Open Options and Secured Ceilings

It’d be a lie to say that we aren’t feverishly working on our house to keep our living options open.  Being completely honest, we always felt like this is our forever house, and every decision I have made for it is for us.  But… we’re also living, as usual my dear Millennials, in unprecedented times.  So, we’re fixing as much as we can, and we’re doing it the right: no hidden problems, just real solutions we’d be happy with no matter who lives here.  Progress has been fairly steady the past several weeks as I rage-build.

We have a laundry list of projects to do this year!  Mostly, I’m finishing things that are already started or making better projects that we did early on.  We’ve been in this house for nearly a decade, and I have learned a lot here.  One thing I learned is not to ignore signs of stress.  So with the broken joist -that has always been broken for us- in our office and the always crooked dining room buffet telling us it was time to get the sinking around our chimney buttoned up, I knew I had to get working.

The Buffet

Our dining room buffet has been crooked since we bought the house.  Doors have never closed quite right, and the bottom drawers stick a bit.  But last summer they seemed to be getting more cranky about operating: it could be the humidity or the pre-teens rough use.  I still knew it was a problem to fix.  Getting proper screws into the hinges helped, and getting the center rail adjusted to hold the center cabinet doors straight was a big step.  Still, nothing in the buffet could be truly better without re-cracking some plaster and lifting the whole thing from below.

Our house had been lifted back in 2017: it was the first major project we embarked on here… and we hired a contractor who knew exactly what to do instead of doing that job ourselves.  I learned a lot then, and from a few subsequent projects elsewhere.  This time, it was my turn.

The Mini-Beam

Our dining room buffet sits right next to our chimney, on the opposite side of the structural beams that surround the stairs.  There are three joists that sit around the chimney, under the buffet, and under part of the kitchen.  This is where one joist -thankfully under the kitchen not the buffet- had snapped.  I elected to add a small beam, not fully structural, but definitely supportive under these three joists along the chimney.  We had explored this back in 2017, but this is exactly where the water heater used to sit.  Moving the water heater gave us a few things: space along the chimney to work, less plumbing and ductwork due to keeping clearances around the gas plumbing, and a reinforced concrete pad that we used as the footing for our posts.

Our posts aren’t fancy: they are screw jacks rated for permanent use.  Each can hold a minimum of 20,000 lbs, so with two we should be in good shape for a very long time.  With my mom’s help, I got the screw jacks installed plum and the mini-beam sitting along the chimney.  Over the next few days, I gradually lifted the mini-beam by turning the screw on the jacks.  With these bolted to the floor and the beam, we’re in.

Sisters

The next big step was getting the broken joist sistered to a new one.  This joist is a little complicated: it sits across three supports, and with the failure of the beam in the middle (one side of the stairs), the span was too long for it to hold across the stairs to the main support beam.  Overtime, it split.  When we did the fixes in 2017 to the beams, the joist was mostly holding together, and it didn’t change the dip in the kitchen.  Sistering it wasn’t the priority then (making sure the porch was held in my more than the roof, however… was.  It got two footings where it had one post-on-grade on the middle.).  Even though it was largely stable, adding the mini-beam made me want to make sure this was as secure as possible.

Sistering was tricky though, since there was not a good way to run a new piece of lumber from end to end along the joist.  My biggest priority was connecting the split section to where the joist was still in good shape.  I cut a notch into one portion of the new joist, and I added a second section with a matching notch along the rest of the joist.  Then I scabbed a bridge over both.  This has secured the joist well!  It no longer dips in the middle, and both the sister and the original joist rest on one end of the mini-beam while continuing over to the beam along the stairs.

Next up, I’m finally getting the office walls buttoned up with another pocket door.  I love these space-saving solutions, but to hang it I really wanted to make sure we were structurally sound.  I started by fixing a 2x6 to the new joist pair where the wall will sit.  With the mini-beam as high as it will go, and a slight slope still in the floor above, The plan is to get the walls well secured so there will never be a risk of future issues.  And the pocket door will slide smooth as silk.