New Stuff I Know
aeghead called me on Tuesday to see if I could help him at his house. He's my brother and I didn't have anything firm on the calendar so I said yes. So we met at his place at 6 and he showed me what we needed to do.
At some point in the past the previous owners had added support to the roof by improperly nailing supports to the ceiling joists. He's fixed the supports but walking around in the attic he had noticed that some of the joists had broken and moved recently. The ceiling was about 4 inches low and he was supposed to have a contractor repairing the ceiling yesterday. The ceiling could not be repaired until the ceiling joists were no longer sagging. So we had to build a new cross-connection joist to attach to a central support, jack the ceiling up into place, and then attach the joists into place.
I don't have pictures. I wish I did. We made 3 ceiling jack stands and used car jacks to push the ceiling into place. He had gotten 2 20 foot long 2x12s and a 20 foot long 2x4 so we could make the support brace that, once it was nailed together, looked kind of like |L
The ceiling jack stands all looked like 8 foot tall upside-down capitol Ls, complete with a little serif on the bottom to put on the car jack. They didn't take long to make from a few 2x4s.
We then, with the help of his buddy Jay, lifted the new joist into the attic and positioned it. We had to jack the ceiling some more after that to get the old joists lifted into place exactly and then aeghead went through the ceiling putting 3 inch screws through the new connector rod on the side of the new joist into the old joists to hold them.
Unfortunately one of the old joists also cracked when we were pushing it up, so he was going to have to add support to it. But that was a 1 man job and it was getting close to 11pm by now and we couldn't get the supplies. So that's what he did yesterday morning. But now I know how to rejoist an 80 year old house.
Please don't make me use that knowledge if you can avoid it. :)
At some point in the past the previous owners had added support to the roof by improperly nailing supports to the ceiling joists. He's fixed the supports but walking around in the attic he had noticed that some of the joists had broken and moved recently. The ceiling was about 4 inches low and he was supposed to have a contractor repairing the ceiling yesterday. The ceiling could not be repaired until the ceiling joists were no longer sagging. So we had to build a new cross-connection joist to attach to a central support, jack the ceiling up into place, and then attach the joists into place.
I don't have pictures. I wish I did. We made 3 ceiling jack stands and used car jacks to push the ceiling into place. He had gotten 2 20 foot long 2x12s and a 20 foot long 2x4 so we could make the support brace that, once it was nailed together, looked kind of like |L
The ceiling jack stands all looked like 8 foot tall upside-down capitol Ls, complete with a little serif on the bottom to put on the car jack. They didn't take long to make from a few 2x4s.
We then, with the help of his buddy Jay, lifted the new joist into the attic and positioned it. We had to jack the ceiling some more after that to get the old joists lifted into place exactly and then aeghead went through the ceiling putting 3 inch screws through the new connector rod on the side of the new joist into the old joists to hold them.
Unfortunately one of the old joists also cracked when we were pushing it up, so he was going to have to add support to it. But that was a 1 man job and it was getting close to 11pm by now and we couldn't get the supplies. So that's what he did yesterday morning. But now I know how to rejoist an 80 year old house.
Please don't make me use that knowledge if you can avoid it. :)