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.