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

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.