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.