We've Got Bats: 10/12/08

I'm sick of bouncy floors. Most of the second story of our house has bouncy, creaky floors and I'm sick of it. The purple room we remodeled is a little bouncy, and so in working in the guest bedroom, I decided to guarantee the floor would be bouncy. So I knew I needed to sister the existing joists, but access to supporting walls wasn't very good. The center wall of the house where the second floor joists overlap was 4-5 feet past the end of the room, so the only place I could actually get full length joists in was around the window. For the rest of the joists, I took Tommy's advice and cut 3/4" plywood into 7 3/4" strips and glued and nailed two layers of 3/4" plywood to each joist. The total span was about 12' so it worked out well cutting from 4x8 sheets of plywood. Each piece of plywood was glued to the old joist (or plywood) and nailed every 16" to the old joist.

In the above picture, you can see the two joists that I was able to get full length joists sistered in, and the last joist you can see has two layers of plywood laminated to it. The plywood is flexible so you can really get it tight, glue and nail it place and adds a TON of stiffness to the joist. The difference was immeadiately noticeable. The plywood also made it really easy to level the floor. The corner you see in the picture was down about an 1" from the opposite corner, so it was easy to level the plywood before nailing it in place. I notched the plywood where it met the wall, so everything is as level as it's going to get. Next I put in 3 rows of blocking. I cut the blocking tight and pounded it in to place and glued and nailed it in. Lastly I cut strips off of 2x material to level the top of the old joist with the new sistered material. I belt-sanded the whole thing flat and glued and screwed sheets of OSB subfloor onto the joists. The difference is pretty amazing, I'm really pleased with how it came out.

I've been slowly moving the porch forward as well. I worked a couple of evenings this past week to get the footings dug and poured. Same old operation, 42+" hole in rocky till, sonotube and 3-4 80 lb bags of concrete.

This morning, I got 7 tons ( only wanted 6, but apparently, they got a little loose loading this morning) of #2 crushed stone delivered. I spread this under where the porch will be, I'll put brick down around the edge when I'm installing the screening later on. For now, it's a nice dry place to stand while working. In the picture below, you see our driveway, which looks like a driveway. What you can't tell is that I moved about 3 tons of new gravel on to it and spread it around. Ugh.