Trying a different leveling method

After talking to my neighbor, I decided to try another way of floor leveling.  Instead of having to cut a shim to go in between the joist and OSB, you just screw and glue a 2x6 to the side of the joist at the correct height.  Doing it this way is significantly faster, and is much easier. Plus, it adds structural integrity to the house although it doesn't work everywhere.  Here is the one of the first ones I tried, it also shows how much the floor sank in this part of the house.  There is a spot 10' away which was 2.5" higher than this.

And after some more work, the rest of the OSB in that room is done.  The orange paint shows where the walls will be, and you can see the vent coming up in the wall now for the odd bedroom.

Opening stairs and moving duct

Going down the stairs, it feels like I'm going to hit my head on the first joist, so I want to move it back and make it a bit higher.  Here's what it was before I started

So I cut it away and shifted the main one 16" back.  I'll be putting in a 2x4 to extend it out so it meets so the wall will meet up with the edge of the window frame, but I'm not doing this until I get over to that area with the floor leveling since I want it to be as high up as possible.

Before I tore everything apart in the upstairs, this bedroom had it's vent in the floor, a foot or two away from the wall.  Since I'm moving the wall back, it'll be even worse than it was, so I got some ducting to shift it into the wall like the rest of the rooms.  This was way more of a pain than I thought it would be...

Pulling more floor

Here's the weird closet that's over the front porch

And the stuff behind it.  They seem to have added blocking because their subfloor was strips that had to be supported by something.  I also had to move around that extra support stud for the roof.  I just used my 20 ton bottle jack for that, but it doesn't seem like the house needs the support without a bunch of snow on the roof.

Starting on floor leveling

Dealing with the ceiling ended up being a pain on such an uneaven floor, and I need to add a load bearing wall because of that old addition on the house, so I decided to do that after the floor.  There are a few ways I found that you can level a floor.  The only one I really saw online was using self leveling cement, but there were a bunch of reasons I didn't want to use it here:

• It would add a lot of new load to the house that it wasn't designed for, and in the spots where it's the heaviest, it's probably where the least amount of weight should be
• It would be very expensive, from what I quickly calculated, at least 6x what redoing the subfloor would cost
• The cement would crack over time, and the problem would come back, but I assume more noticeable
• The floor squeaks a lot, everywhere, and it wouldn't fix that

So I'm going to be using two different methods.  Here's the joists in the front room after ripping the floor up

This is one of the two methods I'm using.  This is more time consuming, but also doesn't require any extra material (excluding the OSB for the actual subfloor).  It's essentially just cutting a large shim to go between the joist and OSB.

This was my process for it:

1. Pick a height that is high enough above the highest spot on the whole floor where it will still be thick enough to have structural integrity
2. Get an old 2x4 that I had from tearing the walls out
3. Clamp it to the side of the joist, put one end to the right height then level it
4. Mark it (very darkly, since the wood itself is dark)
5. Un-clamp it and cut along the line on a table saw
6. Dry fit the new shim to make sure it's right
7. Dust off and put a good amount of liquid nails/construction adhesive down on the joist
8. Put the shim back on
9. Drill a pilot hole, and screw it in every few feet
10. Repeat 2-9

I'm using 22/32 tongue and groove OSB for the subfloor surface material, so then its just cutting, gluing, and screwing that into place

I also decided to put my ~25 bags of waste insulation out for the city to pickup on my bi-weekly extra trash day.

Last ceiling to remove

Before dealing will all the stuff over the stairs, I built a temporary platform out of OSB so it would be easy and safer to work over there

Here it is after it was all removed

So based off of everything I've seen it seems for the 2nd floor, the only original part is from the front room, back to the wall between the master bedroom and bathroom, and only as wide as the front room.  It also explains why there is that one load baring stud that didn't seem like it should be.  More on all of this later, here's an inside roof with shingles still on it

Front room ceiling gone

Another day and another ceiling to pull down, here's how much re-usable cellulose I got out of the front room

After cleaning up

Here's how much reusable insulation I have so far

And the trash stuff, plus the door from the inside

More ceiling removal

Now I'm removing the next section of ceiling, stopping where the lath does.  In the rest of the house, it is just a layer of decomposing wool with the cellulose right on top of it, so I'm not able to save as much of the cellulose like I could in the master bedroom.  But I'm just bagging everything this time.

Time to rearrange everything so I can do more of the ceiling later

And at some point in all of that, a bat scared me and I stepped through the small hole in the floor where the plumbing for the bathtub was, so I made a nice mess downstairs

Nice way of fixing it after cleaning it up

Lighting the basement

I finally got around to doing temporary lights for the basement.  None of the lights were on switches and it was pretty dark down there, so I used more cat5e and sockets to put in 6 bulbs around the basement, running off the switch at the top of the stairs.

Removing bathroom ceiling

My Dad went back to Idaho, so I'm back to doing things on my own again.  Now I'm removing the rest of the ceilings upstairs, and the bathroom was first.

New door and messes

I didn't take many pictures, but we put in a temporary-ish door.  Once the upstairs is done, I'll be moving up there and doing the downstairs, so I need a way to get in up there, plus it makes getting large materials inside much easier.  This was just an all in one thing from Lowe's that cost about $200.  Once I get around to doing the siding I'll replace the door and frame with something permanent.

We also broke the window on the stairs as we were moving a cart of trash down...

And made a mess of the front yard.  I backed my truck right up to the front door so we didn't have to deal with moving the carts down the front stairs and up into the bed.

Blowing Insulation

I didn't take any pictures, but before blowing the insulation back up, we put the new fiberglass insulation in to block the holes where the cellulose would just blow out.  We also put up the drywall on the slanted sections of the ceiling so we didn't have to worry about it falling out as we were working.

To actually blow the insulation up, we used the same server blower (I think it came from an IBM Bladecenter Type H) where that black hose I used to get dusty stuff out the window came from, in addition to 2 new 25' 8" hoses like I had before.  We tried a few different ways of actually blowing it, like feeding the insulation into the fan itself.  This didn't work since it kept clogging up, so we tried it with an old blower from what I am guessing was a swamp cooler, with a newish 3/4HP motor, but it also clogged up quickly.  We ended up buying some ducting so it could be fed into the air stream going into the 8" hose, and also attaching the other 8" hose to the intake and ran it outside so we wouldn't be sucking in insulation.  At first it was a pain to get the insulation in without it just blowing back out, but after awhile we got the hang of it.

You're probably wondering why we didn't just rent an actual insulation blowing machine to do this.  Well, since we're reusing the stuff that was already here, there's a bunch of crap in it like nails, screws, and small shards of wood, which I'm guessing would damage the machine.  Plus it's more fun to make your own.  A few months later I helped my neighbor insulate his attic, where we used a real insulation blower.  Mine was just as fast.  When I do the rest of the attic I'm going to try and make a system to feed it in.

My Dad preferred feeding the insulation compared to controlling where the hose went, so that's what he did most of the time.

Here's a video from the beginning, we clearly had no idea what we were doing...

And what it looked like on the output side

Soon after that we figure out the key was turning the blower sideways so the input was by the floor, and just shove it in from a big pile.  Luckily cellulose isn't itchy, so it's like playing in snow without the cold and wet.  We also decided to use that old swamp cooler blower to help get the dust out, when we turned the insulation blower off, all the dust would be gone within a few minutes.  I used an adjustable pulley on it and ran it at about 1.25HP so it moved a ton of air.

Here's a longer video which shows a better example of the process.  I'd make sure my dad had a pile and move the output hose around to get the insulation everywhere in the attic.  All the stuff drew around 18.5A.  The insulation blower requires at least 200V to turn on since it has a built-in VFD which I don't know how to control, so we had to use a transformer.  When I do the rest of the attic, I think I'll switch my supply up here to 240V and switch the other blower wiring over to 240V as well so I have less voltage drop on that 14AWG extension cord running upstairs.

It really was like it was snowing in there, this is the extension cord that ran the blower going outisde

And after we got enough insulation up in the first part, before we put more drywall up

Finally done with the attic of this room

Then we took the cellulose out of the walls and bagged it for later, and put the new fiberglass in.  There's some missing since a door will be going there.

Raising the ceiling

The ceilings in the upstairs were originally around 6'10", which felt pretty cramped, especially since downstairs they are 7'6" - 8'.  So I decided to raise the ceiling in the upstairs.  Luckily, because of the way the house was built, it actually isn't that difficult.  Above the ceiling in the master bedroom, there was a layer of (seemingly decomposing) wool insulation, then some unfaced fiberglass, and then the modern cellulose that's also in the walls.  This was actually really helpful since I wanted to reuse the cellulose after the ceiling was raised, but not the wool since it was dirty and gross.  Here's what it looked like after removing the old drywall on the ceiling and letting all the wool insulation fall out

And then with the fiberglass pulled out and all the cellulose knocked down (after cleaning up all the other stuff)

We (my Dad took some vacation time to come out and help me) decided to try and leave all of this there while we raised the ceiling joists and put up the drywall on the ceiling so we didn't have to bag any of it.  This ended up being a major pain in the ass and we would have been much better off bagging it.  Here's a look before we started raising them

Raising the ceiling joists were pretty simple, it was just pulling them down, cutting the ends, and then putting it back up in the new position.  Here's a few done, the new ceiling is about 8'4"

You can see the difference between the new and old height easier in this picture.  We didn't move the first joist yet, so it's still right over the windows

Finally all done

And now to put up some of the drywall, I bought a drywall lift from Harbor Freight and it was extremely helpful

Checking on the insulation

Surprisingly, this house was actually insulated for the most part through blowin cellulose, but there are some spots that didn't have any.  I also talked to my neighbor and he said that attaching drywall to other materials (like lath), and he said it generally doesn't stay on long term, especially on ceilings, so I'm just going to take it all out and replace it with fiberglass then mount the drywall directly to the studs.

I also decided to look down that cavity next to the chimney, it's just open, but there's one of the main supports for the house at the bottom, so unfortunately there's no reasonable way to run an HVAC duct through there for the upstairs like I wanted (so I could remove the others since they'll be a pain later).