Day 4

Big day today... while Gina and I were Black Fridaying (side note, I bought a Christmas tree!), Wayne and Matt made some serious moves in the front room. In fact, we arrived home to this:

That's right, they brought the beam down and put it up! Craziness. So, even though we missed that one, we were there for putting in the beam in the killing room and I, of course, recorded the whole process. As a refresher, here's where we started:

The first step was to take the weight off the beam that's currently in there. So, Matt, James and I brought in a bottle jack and two 4x4s and began to work on supporting the floor so we could take the pressure off the the original beam:

We got the first one in and started to try to move the beam, but we quickly realized that  about where Matt is standing in the above picture, we needed some more support. So it was back to the garage to cut another beam so we could up the ante support-wise. And then with the second support firmly in place, we could start cutting:

and then piece by piece:

We took the beam out:

With the beam gone, we were left with the leaning tower of bricks that used to support the house. Of course, we weren't going to put the new beam back on the old tower.

 

So, we took it down. First I took a couple swings and then James went at it with a wreaking bar:

And then it was gone:

To prep for installing the posts, we drilled holes in the newly poured concrete and installed the metal plates that will support the posts:

The next step was to cut the new beam:

And then get it into the basement. Since the large beam went in through the coal chute, we tried taking these beams that way. It went pretty well at first:

We got it in, moved it into the second room

And then, trouble... we could get it into the killing room, but couldn't get it positioned above the pipe that  runs along the far wall. The geometry just wouldn't work, no matter what we did.

So, we went to Plan C (remember, the coal chute was Plan B), and we popped out the window in the killing room (thanks to James for the game saving idea)

Then we took the beam that was stuck in the room, passed it out the window and back in the room over the pipe

 We propped it up on a ladder and Matt applied some glue so we begin to piece the beam together (remember, each beam is made up of three pieces of LVL which need to be glued and screwed together):

Here's Matt applying the glue:

We then brought the second board in through the window and stuck it to the first one, making sure it was even at every point. And then Wayne drilled pilot holes and Matt screwed the boards together

The finished project is three LVL boards that won't come apart except for an act of God. But, at this point, the ladder was still the main support in the room, which worked, but not in the long term. So the next step was to put in the posts:

Lots of pounding, leveling, straightening, more pounding, some nails, some screws, and here's where we ended up:

Beam installed! Minus the middle post (that's a whole other story, but basically the 6x6 that needs to go in here is currently holding up the heaviest point in the front room because we wanted the cement pad to set some more before we install the last post. Long story short, its occupied until tomorrow). And you can see Matt putting the window back up in the last shot.

Of course, we also had to do some work on the front room. Turns out that our floor, surprise, surprise, isn't totally level. Not only that, but since there is an addition, the floor boards in the addition are at a different height that the boards in other parts of the house. Long story short, we cut the beam to support part of the addition and then realized that we'd have to raise the floor by quite a bit in the addition to actually get the beam under it, which means it would be less, not more, level. So Wayne had to do some magic with a Sawzall and cut a notch in the beam so that we wouldn't unlevel our floor:

Yes, that is Wayne's hand you can kinda see holding a Sawzall. And yes, he is laying in the crawlspace to achieve this. Amazing, seriously.