Beam Me Up

With a long weekend ahead of us, (we put the labor in Labor Day) we decided it was a perfect opportunity for beam raising day.

We already had the temporary wall in place.  Walt Kowalski need to do some clean up and prep work.  He had to cut out a section of one of the old studs to create a pocket for the beam.

 

You can see the holes the previous owners cut in the main rafters.  Really?!? Let's just cut through this main support beam for the house and put in a piece of duct work. 

 

 
Power Tower was there to help.  I can do so much, but with double the height, he can do so much more high things without ladders.  I spend most of my time moving my ladder.  (Stilts!)

Basically, we screwed together three 2"x8"x12' boards to make our beam.

 
There were no photos of the actual beam raising because I was helping to lift. We made a pocket in the wall on one side, lifted the beam into the pocket, then made a support on the other side and lifted the beam into the support.

It was tight.  Very tight.  Which is good, but also made it more difficult to get the beam in the exactly location. he exact location being directly under the wall upstairs and directly above the supports in the basement.

Then we *very* carefully removed the support wall, one 2x4 at a time.  The second floor shift only slightly down into place on our beam.

Now the most important part, admiring our work and talking about the next step. You can see the slight gap between the beam and the ceiling. on the left side. We expect that because the floor upstairs had a slight bow in the middle. Walt Kowalski will fill in that space as needed.

We did something correct because as we were removing our support wall, we heard one of the support jacks in the basement fall out onto the floor.  The temporary support wall had been pushing down on the first floor and up on the second floor. By removing the temporary wall, the first floor raised up from the supports and the second floor lowered on to the beam. Now we could tighten all of our jack posts in the basement and know the second floor was resting properly on the beam on the jack posts.