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| Removed the ceiling plaster first |
You would think they go together, old people and old houses, but we are finding that occasionally the two are in conflict.
Handyman and I have started back on our eternal (it seems) endeavor to renovate this old farmhouse, but our efforts turned against us. We are the old people involved, you see. We have one last major project that must be done, an upstairs bedroom whose plaster ceiling had finally been falling in, whose deeply bowed flooring needed straightening, and whose walls were sandwiched between and thus on the agenda for removal. A major undertaking for anyone.
This sort of work is now firmly in my husbands domain, while I took on the yard renovation that was past due. Little did we realize, after a rosy start full of vim and vigor, that we would outdo ourselves. Only not in a positive way.
We overworked, and our bodies rebelled. Water on the knee and a three week sciatica flare up for him, damaged knee and pulled calf muscles for me. Oh, we were a pair, I tell you!
However, we had made some progress in the meantime and I have some pictures. I am hoping to entice Handyman away from Facebook to fill in the how-to details so far.
And this is how we prod this old house blog awake…
What you are seeing in the picture above is the new (light colored) joists “sistered” (scabbed) onto the old oak (dark) joists. I glued and screwed the new joists to the old joists. The old joists increasingly bow as they get to the center of the room with nearly a 4″ dip at that point. Once all the new joists were in place, I subsequently trimmed off the bowed (underside) part of the oak joists so that it was now even with the new joists. This resulted in a more or less double joisting.