Survey Says...

Before I could really get under the house and start digging footings for new piers, it really helps to make a blueprint so you can see how everything is currently built. I always knew there were stairs under the house, but for some reason I thought the inaccessible area near them was much smaller than it really is. Perspective changes when you're under a house I guess. Here's about how everything is currently built. It brings in some new challenges that I wasn't expecting.



For reference, the wide opening at the top of the picture is the entrance from the kitchen to the family room. One square = one foot. The wall by the words "LOAD BEARING" is the one that I filled in after we moved here. Not on the drawing is the deck because that's not really important at this point, and the master bedroom / bathroom on the other side of the load bearing wall. I marked where existing piers are (except for under the load bearing wall since there are plenty of those) and where a beam under the floor currently runs. Joist span is currently about 16 feet in most places.

To start, I plan on adding three piers, shown on the drawing as being in line with each other near the bottom. The extra rectangle is something I forgot to erase, but shows about the line that the next set of piers running to the right under the master bathroom will need to be in. I planned on doing the same in the family room on the other side of the existing beam to cut that span in half, but ran into a bit of a problem.



Yes, those are stairs and a brick wall under the house... or under the living room to be exact. The rough position of all that is on the survey too. Before the room I'm writing this post in was made it was the back yard. There was a deck behind the house; a nice one lined in brick with a concrete top. When the place was added on to the outer layer of brick was knocked out and the concrete was removed to provide room for floor joists, but the rest of the brick, stairs and fill material was left alone. What this means is that I can add a short beam under that half of the family room before I have to stop because there's no more room left to work. The best way around this little problem is to wait until I have the flooring up in the family room, excavate a few inches of fill material and re-pour the top of the concrete slab. Then I'll be able to easily shim between the top of that slab and the bottom of the floor joists to make that half of the room feel a lot more solid than it does now.



So far I've completed one hole for a new footing and half of the second. No small task since I'm digging a hole one foot deep / two feet long/wide, and doing it with a garden trowel. The layers in the soil are kind of cool, except the bottom one has a lot of clay and is harder to dig in. So far I've filled a 36 gallon trash can with dirt, plus some (no we're not throwing it out... gotta put it somewhere until I can decide what to do with it).





And of course, the area under the bedroom and bathroom needs just as much reinforcement as under the family room. What fun.