More floors

I cut, glued, and screwed down the OSB that I already had upstairs, so now when I get to the top of the stairs I actually have something to stand on.  Then I had to move more up from the garage, which was more of a pain than the last time since there was about a foot of snow on the ground.

For the bathroom I decided to use pressure treated plywood instead of the OSB because of all that water damage from before.  It cost more and was heavier, but hopefully it means I won't have to replace it for a long time.  When I put it down, I only put a few screws in each since I'll have to pull it back up for doing plumbing.

And it's all done

Now to clean up and put down the paint lines for reference

Brackets brackets brackets

I tried putting the notched cross-joist in again, and it cracked in the same way, for the 3rd time.  So I'm just going to glue it tomorrow and be done with it.  To fill the gaps in the notching in the upper parts of the joists I shimmed it.  It's amazing how stable the joists are now, far more than in the front room with the ceiling attached to the bottom.  I also put the brackets on each of the joints on opposite corners like my friend said to

Rolling the joists

All the joists are hung, it's surprising how impossible they are to walk across like this because of how it resonates since there is no ceiling attached to the bottom and nothing on top.

This is how I did around the toilet, I left more space than I needed to so it's easy to work in if I need to, plus it shouldn't be hard to add some blocking for support if its needed.

I talked to my civil engineer friend, and he said I should add a cross-joist under where the one bedroom wall is, since it might end up being load bearing when there is a lot of snow on the roof.  To do this, I'm running a 2x8 perpendicular to the joists, with each notched out so they fit together, and then using brackets to tie it all together.  Here's the markings for the notches

While I was cutting the notches, I ended up cutting through one of the nails in the double 2x8, so that's cool looking

After seeing the state of the subfloor in the bathroom from all the water, I decided I want to be able to replace it down the road easily.  So instead of putting the bottom plate for the wall on top of the sub floor like normal, I'm putting it directly on the joists.  I decided to put it in now so can more easily walk across the joists (it was surprising how much it helped).  This picture also shows the notching.

I notched the perpendicular 2x8 as well, here's what it looked like

 
Then tried to put it in, but the wood split on the end

Since I had the extra wood I decided to give it another shot, and loosen up some of the notches in the joists so I wouldn't need to hammer so much.  And it happened again, so at this point I was done for the night.

Pulling the joists

First off, I'm finally caught up on this, so what happened in this post actually happened today.

Pulling the joists out actually went pretty well, I just cut them in the large notches and at the other and an pulled the 3 chunks out for each.  Here it is with the main sections of a few done

That board I fell off of yesterday is incredibly useful when I don't fall off of it

And they're all out now

Because of the fact these are 2x8s, and they really should be larger than that, I decided to put them on an 11" center instead of 16".  The ones that were originally there were also 2x8's but their actual dimensions were 1.75x8, unlike the 1.5x7.25 we have today. 

Side note:  Hammering is much, much harder than it first seems, especially with larger nails.  If you haven't tried hammering a 16 penny coated sinker before, you should, it's an eye opening experience.

So here it is with the joist hangers installed, there's a larger space for the rightmost one because I'll be doing the glue/screw thing on the side of the joist that is still there.

I also decided to put in the one double joist today.  There is one double one because I'll be framing around the toilet drain properly, instead of notching out 6 out of the 8" and then trying to reinforce it

Falling through

Here's all the stuff pulled off the joists, one of them is gone since it broke completely in half while I was removing stuff.  Another one of them split down the middle for about 4'.

Originally, I was planning on gluing and screwing a 2x8 to each side of the joists to reinforce them, similar to the normal joist leveling process, but then I saw how useless most of them where.  So now I'm just going to pull all of them and replace them.  But, the ceiling on the first floor is held up by them, so I have to put something there to support it.

In order to be able to work by the outside wall, I had to make something to stand on since the joists will be gone, so I attached a 12' 2x4 vertically to the bottom of a 12' 2x8.

And then I tried to walk across it before I finished stabilizing it...falling through the ceiling.  Luckily, I managed to fall in a way where I didn't get hurt

But I made a mess downstairs, if only I was able to get a picture of my legs dangling there

At least drop ceilings are really easy to fix, so from being in the floor to everything cleaned up, it was only about 40 minutes.  Once spot of the metal buckled, and only one tile broke, so it was easy to deal with.

Cleaning out junk

I removed all the pipes except for the cast iron one to the toilet, and then scooped out all the insulation and other junk.  The people who butchered the joists at least seem to have made an effort to reinforce it, but clearly it wasn't enough.  Now that all the crap is out, it's a lot easier to see how bad it is

Moving onto the bathroom

For the closet in the weird bedroom, I decided I didn't want to deal with leveling the floor because of the ceiling being so low, and it wouldn't be too noticeable since people can't really walk around in there.  I regretted that after trying to put the OSB down since the tongue wouldn't go into the grove on the other board so I had to cut it off.

To start on the bathroom, I had to move the stockpile of stuff out of it first

Here's another angle to show how much the floor sank in this part of the house

Getting the layer of plywood up was a massive pain in the ass because of the ridiculous amount of nails

The other other sheet had a ton of water damage (and nails), so this made me decide to switch from OSB for the subfloor to pressure treated plywood

The whole area around the toilet was absolutely disgusting, it doesn't come across well through pictures though.  There was some kind of flaky build-up over a lot of the wood and pipes which were directly under it

This is the old subfloor from the whole 2nd floor excluding the master bedroom, it's amazing how much less space it takes up when it's actually the floor.

Here it is with all the subfloor pulled up, way too much insulation to shovel out...  This also explains why the floor was sagging so much, it's hard to see because of all of the insulation, but those joists are butchered

Well time to go to Lowes and pick up some 16' 2x8s to reinforce all of it I guess

I don't even have to cut much material off of them

More floors

And more floors have been ripped up and are ready to level

But I ran out of wood, so I needed to move more in from the garage.  This is where the new exterior door is extremely useful, but first I had to get all that snow out of the way in the yard, and shovel off the roof over the porch

I didn't take any pictures, but to get the OSB up onto the porch roof, I put up my ladder and slid the OSB up it and onto the roof.  The 2x6s are light enough they can just be thrown a bit to get up there

The one joist had a crack in part of it, so I decided to glue and screw the 2x6's to both sides to give it some extra support.  You can also see where I added the 2x4 as the mini-joist for over the stairs.  the part where your head would hit is about 8" farther back and 5" higher, so it feels much better.

And with OSB and wall lines painted