©In the remodeling business, the biggest thing that you have to pay attention to is the unknowns.  It may appear to be a simple process to make an addition on a house, but even after a careful examination, a house might reveal a problem that can stop a project in its tracks.  I am going to discuss one project that suffered just such a revelation.

In 2005, we were in the early phases of a large two story addition onto a early 1900s home of a great room, kitchen, and laundry room with a master bedroom suite above.

Here is the house before we started

and this is what it would develop into after 5 months of work

We needed to determine the original floor level so we could match the new framing to the old so the floor would plane out from the old dining room into the proposed great room. Like this:

 The problems started to manifest themselves when we stripped off the existing hardwood flooring only to discover another layer of vinyl sheet flooring with underlayment, and a layer of vinyl tile with underlayment, and a layer of linoleum tile, all of which was nailed, stapled, screwed, and glued to the original tongue and groove fir flooring fastened to the tops of over spanned 2x8s.  

We removed nearly 3 inches of material!  Not only that, we discovered that the middle of the floor had sagged an additional 2 inches in some spots due to the over spanned joists.  It was going to be an easy to double the joists’ load capacity by sistering new joists to the existing, but the real zinger was about to reveal itself.

Since we were not only marrying floors together, but exterior walls, we needed to strip the inside of the exterior walls.  What we discovered was abandoned porch framing, infilled with window framing, infilled with studs, all held together with drywall and wallpaper.  So imagine for a minute, 14 feet of exterior bearing wall, originally framed to be a cut-in porch with two big 8-foot openings and a door.  Those openings were then made into 2 windows and a door, which were then all filled in to accommodate a solid kitchen wall.  What could possibly be left of the original structure of this wall?  Two studs.  That’s it.  Two.  On a traditional 14 foot wall, there would be at least 10 to 12 studs.  Here we have two.  These two studs are bearing the entire load on a 14 foot span of second story, rafters, and roofing.  We are in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 tons resting on two points over as many as 80 years.  After suffering that kind of abuse, these simple framing members become something other than a stud, they become an axe.  Slowly pushing through the sill plates by sheer pressure.  Tons of pressure, constantly pounding on an area less than six square inches does this.

as you can see, those two studs are making their way through the sill plate.  The stud on the left has gone about a half an inch in, and the stud on the right has penetrated about 7/8 of an inch.  The corner, which should have supported a good portion of the weight, was already in progressed stages of failure.

With the added damage from dozens of nails, the corner had compressed from 11 ½ inches (measured from the concrete foundation to the bottom of the sub floor) to a struggling 8 1/8 inches.  

That’s right.  The outside corner of this house had dropped over three inches.  There was no simple way to make the lines of the walls and the levels of the floors to line up.  Ever.  Our solution was to transfer the load to temporary steel and laminated beams in the middle of the room and on the exterior of the house.   
          

You can see in the pictures some of the jacks we used for the lift.  With 40 tons of lifting power, we slowly picked the house up into its original position.

When the house was where we needed it to make the floor level out and the wall line up, we set about reframing the first floor band board, reinforcing the first floor joists, reframing the exterior wall, and reinforcing the second floor joists.

Below you can see the new 2x12 joist bolted to the second floor joist, and the new 2x6 stud wall.

Now that the old house was repaired and aligned, we could now start on the addition.  This was just an example of what you could encounter on a project in the fun and exciting field of residential remodeling.  It is through a little on-site engineering, team work and understanding homeowners that this project was able to continue with only a small delay in the schedule.

Here is a picture of the project only days after finishing the repair.  You can see that the roof overbuild is completed and the rear wall on the first floor is demolished, ready to extend 22 feet over the new 9 foot foundation.

We could have accomplished level floors and even walls by adding more material to already failing structure, and simply declared that the repairs are not part of the agreed upon project, but that is not how we operate.  This work needed to be done to insure that our clients, the homeowners, would be able to live in their house for many years to come without any worry of cracking drywall, doors becoming misaligned, floors buckling, windows not functioning properly, or even eventual catastrophic failure.  We strive to make sure that our clients experience the highest level of satisfaction possible, and if that means that sometimes we need to do a little extra to take care of unforeseen circumstances, then all we have to say is: “Our pleasure!”

Questions and Comments are Welcome!

blogmeisternails@consolidatedconstruct.com