Bridging Gaps

It's been a while long time since my last post. The Great Laziness set in on me for the winter, then I had to go to LA for a couple months for work. Extended trips tend to leave me in another state of laziness when I get home.
Now, I'm back to being productive in my East room wing. I spent my Sunday installing bridging between floor joists in an attempt to stiffen things. First, I tried the metal single-nail tension bridges. It worked between a couple joists, but most gaps between joists were too wide. I ended up putting a 2x8 bridge between most of them. It helped some, but, like I expected, there's still a fair amount of bounce. Securing the sub-floor and finished floor may help some with that, but most likely I'll install a beam underneath to keep things from bouncing.
If you're wondering about the black strips on the joists, that's roofing felt. It's often used on top of sub floors to get rid of waviness or general unevenness. I decided that since I had a few joists that were 1/8" or 1/4" too low, they could be a good solution to even things out before installing the subfloor.
One thing I need to figure out is how to fasten the subfloors with strips of roofing felt below them. The normal method is to put down construction adhesive and nail the floors down. I've planned on using screws to hold the subfloor down. At this point, I can't decide if that's enough since construction adhesive on the top layer of roofing felt wouldn't do anything. Maybe I'll just break down and glue every layer of felt beforehand just to be safe. After all, it's only 4-8 layers on 5 joists for 13 feet.
Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.
In the meantime, I need to research thermal breaks between the wall and floor's edge and also research putting up new framing for the walls. I've decided that I should frame in new walls 6" from the exterior walls and put in insulation. In other words, I may have this room finished in less than a year and a half, but it might be closer to two.

Joist For Fun

It seems this can result with unnoticed water penetration. The leaks are long gone, but nobody fixed the results.

Today I worked on getting prepared for some brick work that needs to be done. This is in the East room that is currently torn apart. Obviously it has no floor. Right now the ceiling has been removed as well. While removing the wainscoting, this corner lost some bricks. This morning I removed the fallen bricks, then scraped mortar and vacuumed. 


After that, I could get a good look at the joists in that corner. The last three joists were considerably lower in that corner. I thought I would just sister them and build up the subfloor to flat above. However, after seeing what's in the picture below, I decided to jack them up and make sure they're sitting on a solid foundation. 

Results of former half-hearted repairs.

It might be hard to see in the picture above, but the joist on the left is sitting on two semi-rotten 2x4 boards stacked on top of each other. The middle joist is partially rotted on the very end so that it only has less than an inch on the foundation. The joist on the right was rotted back further so that it almost seemed like it was barely on the joist. 

Now that the joists are raised and sistered, these water pipes will make removing the rotten 2x4 boards quite fun. The pipes are likely to be removed soon for a re-plumbing project. 

Unfortunately, this last joist also has the house entry for the two gas lines drilled through the middle and, therefore, cannot be raised. Considering this, I decided to use raise the left two joists to rebuild the foundation underneath. Another trip to Home Depot and I came home with two new jack posts and three four-foot joist pieces to sister to the ends to make sure they don't slip off. After some post wrestling and cursing in the cellar, during which I had a scare when the right-most joist actually slipped off the foundation, I had two of three joists jacked to level. Next, I sistered the three of them and replaced the subfloor (still temporary). 

Jacked and sistered