This week's game plan...

These sort of things never seem to work out, but here's what I would LIKE to accomplish this week:

Tuesday - Build the beams for the living room and entry hall. Clean up, patch, and measure to see what size pieces of plastic sheeting will be needed to patch the vapor barrier.

Wednesday - Raise the beams and shim into place. Buy supplies needed to install vapor barrier and get to it.

Thursday - Saturday - More of the same

Sunday - Catch up on whatever didn't get accomplished earlier. If finished putting in the vapor barrier, order the dehumidifier and some car parts that I need. Add blocking in the living room and start putting in the new subfloor.

We'll see how well this goes...

Living Room - Post 5

I've been pretty busy since the last post. Everything old is out and I'm most of the way through rebuilding. Here's what everything looked like once I got the wood flooring out. 

This might look solid, but I wouldn't walk on it. Even Snowy realized he might fall through the floor.

Removing the old subfloor was easy, but time consuming. It also made a huge mess. Once it came out I could finally see in good lighting just how bad the joists were.

Everything looks a lot better in this picture than it did in person. Most of them were unsound, and I managed to nearly break through two of them just from walking around.

Footings going in. They're MUCH easier to dig while standing up, using a shovel compared to the ones I dug last year with the garden trowel.

This is about the worst that the room looked. New joists are starting to go in. The first few were the hardest then it became a lot easier once I really knew what I was doing. They're all double 2x8s.

Here's an up close view of all the mold that was growing down there. It was all inactive but still made the place smell like a basement. I don't even want to know what it was like when the insulation was still around.

Using two car jacks to support the new joists going in really made life a lot easier. I could get both ends exactly where they needed to be and then put the hangers in.

Footings are also a lot easier to pour from above. I was able to wheel the concrete in and use the garden hose to add water. What used to take over an hour to do can now be done in minutes.

Here's what it all looks like now. New joists are in place, footings are in and it's time to build the piers. Those will go in tomorrow and I can put the beam in on Wednesday. I'll raise it in place the next day. Also, the plastic for the vapor barrier for the crawlspace came in the mail and I can start taking care of that this week. Looking ahead, once the plastic is in place I can put in the dehumidifier and permanently install the subfloor in this room. It's nice to be in the construction end of a project instead of the tearing up the house end, and the kitchen should go a lot faster thanks to everything I learned in here.