This picture (look carefully for the bubble) is on the new beam running crosswise on the house. The picture below shows the new beam running the length of the house and shows the best picture of the post forest in the basement.
The long beam on the right runs down the center of the front of the house and has stiffened a too long span behind where I'm standing. It also lightened the load on the monster short beam you can see on the left by the old chimney remains. Straight ahead in front of the 1960's furnace is the crosswise beam that I had the level on in the picture above. The total length of the long beam is >20ft and the highest spot is about 1/2" above the lowest spot. There are still some occasional waves in various places, but the major sag has been taken out and everything is nice and solid now. You can stomp around in the dining room all you want and nothing will happen. The brunt of the work was done by this beast below. It's 5 2x12's nailed into a beam underneath a severly weakened (they just had to have heat register there, huh) that wasn't well supported and had settled nicely to the tune of 2.5"+. It was all we could do with a pair of 25 ton jacks to get it where it is and this thing's holding a lot of the weight.
We used steel posts for everything, mostly sitting on newly poured reinforced concrete pads. The posts above are sitting on an old poured slab that we discovered was significantly thicker and tougher than anticipated when a section of it was ripped up for one footing. It's a minimum of 4" and as thick as 6" in places sitting on top of nasty NY glacial till.
The damage to the house while jacking was relatively small. A lot of the trim in the living room and dining room (directly above the lowest point) had all been carefully applied to look reasonable square with the massive sink in the floor. So there's some fairly crazy-town trim downstairs, a significant amount of it had to get yanked at various times during the jacking as the walls started to move and it started racking against each other. We got 3 or 4 small cracks above doorways upstairs and none of the upstairs doors operate normally any more!
You can see an example crack on the left and one of the crazy doors on the right. It would appear I'm going to be getting lots of practice in re-hanging doors in my near future. I'll take that over the refrigerator sinkhole!
Lastly, Some already shady drain plumbing that was badly sloped and held together w/ duct tape had finally broken basically wide open and had become a mild flood of, uh, tainted water in the basement.
So I broke out my mad plumbing skills and replaced the horizontal branch line that feeds all three of our bathrooms. And, it only took me two trys. Luckily 3" PVC is only 7$ for 5 feet, so it only cost me
15$ and a few extra swears. I'm still not quite sure how I loused that up. I figure in the adhesives degree of difficulty scale, there's double sticky tape, solvent welding, then hot glue guns. Which means, skill level wise, I'm significantly below those needed for scrapbooking. Win some, lose some I suppose!Hope you are enjoying the last bit of summer and your gardens are producing mountains of head sized acorn squash.
