Peeking At The Past

22 January 2017

We've made a fair bit of progress this week. We removed all the flooring in the kitchen as well as most of the structure. I was expecting to be able to salvage less than half of the flooring, but it looks like we saved 60-70%. Yay!

The exposed structure in this part of the house invites us to speculate about the history of how the house was built and grew in size over the years. 1st they constructed a two story rectangular house (behind me in this picture). Then they built a separate kitchen about 25 feet off the back of the house. Then they connected the house and the kitchen. We based this conclusion on the pair of 8x8 beams running parallel between the house and kitchen with notched and mortised floor joists between them, and the fact that the kitchen/dining room floor was about 4" lower than the house floor. There is also a change in the wall framing at the same point where the floor structure changes. Then they widened this connector about 2.5 feet on the right and 3 feet on the left, but just in the dining room area. (the beam on the left isn't visible because it has rotted away). The short floor joists on either side of the central structure were set on ledger boards and toe-nailed to the beams.

In addition to the brick veneer that covered the original fireplace, we found that brick hearth had also been added because it broke loose when I removed the floor boards around it.

Amy and I removed the remaining bricks and mortar to expose the "original" hearth. I use quotes here because I can't tell if this was really part of the original construction.

We also discovered an electrical grounding rod with wire still attached. Based on its condition and location (underneath what used to be a back porch and is now the north west corner of the dining room) this predates the other two grounding rods I have found around the outside of the house.

This part of one of the 8x8 sill beams had been replaced with modern 6x6 lumber. With no accommodation to support the notched floor joists, cinder block piers were installed under each joists to hold up the floor. You can also see how the 6x6 sagged over time and spacer blocks had to be put in under each of the wall studs.

Here we've got nearly all of the floor structure removed. I haven't moved the loose sill beams yet because they are connected with mortis and tennon joints that I can't get apart. I'll have to use a saw.

Our plan at this point to is replace all the missing and rotted sill beams with fresh 8x8 beams, either reused old lumber or new. I intend to use new dimension lumber, probably 2x8's, for the floor joists. I also plan to put in a new beam down the center of the room so that no joist span is more than 10 feet. I also don't want to weaken the beams with mortises for the floor joists so I'm going to use joist hangers. Hopefully the building inspector will get on board with our liberal restoration efforts. But until we've had our initial consultation visit, we'll finish the demo work and clean things up a bit.