Hey everyone!

I had some time off work from  Dec-24 through Jan-2. With that time off I decided to take care of a pain point Karianne has had since October. Backstory: Right after our land sold I was tempted to try and replace the roof on the existing house as a way to get started on the project (when I say replace, I literally mean take the existing roof completely off and then put a new one on). It was too late in the year to do it myself with winter weather coming (turns out we are still waiting for the winter weather to show up lol) so I asked for some quotes for someone else to remove and replace the roof. 

Right before we got the quotes back I decided to buy all the new floor joists for the floor structure over the master. This floor needs to be strengthened and new exterior walls built on that new floor before the new roof can be put on. The floor/master ceiling was framed with 2×6’s which is fine to hold up sheetrock and some light storage but it is not strong enough for bedrooms. So we brought home all the 2×10 joists and we stored them in the living room right inside the front door. Cause I mean, they won’t be there that long right?  Then I got the quotes back and it was about twice what I was expecting…………….. so we canceled that plan and well, the joists have been sitting in the living room ever since.

Not sure if you all have spotted the problem for Karianne, but let’s just say a pile of lumber in the living room isn’t her favorite

Therefore I spent all my holiday down time rolling around in insulation that was covered in old mouse droppings and balancing precariously on existing joists to run the new ones and to hang a bunch of joist brackets.  I had to get up and lay down what felt like infinity times and hammer in very tight spaces. Can you think of a better way to spend your holiday break? I can’t 🙂

Page 22 of 24 of the packet I sent out last time lays out what I was working on. Here is a marked up picture of it. I was able to run all the new joists inside the red rectangle (the other joists will have to wait for the roof to get pulled off). The green lines are the existing walls of the closet and there is a little gap between that closet and the ceiling below. It was pretty hard to work under there and reach through the small gap.

I did have to open up a big hole in our laundry room to get a little more access to the area under the existing closet. The only other pain point I will mention is that I had to pull back a lot of the existing electrical in order to be able to run the new joists. Somehow when I wired it all back up, it all worked. So miracles do happen!

Anyhow, enough rambling. Take a look the two video links to get a feel of what we did the last couple weeks. Kind of hard to explain with words.

Mouse Gifts – Not for the faint of heart….

 Logistics of running some of the new joists

The remaining joists and  the subfloor are now stored up there and are all out of the way. Karianne is pleased 🙂

The next couple weeks we won’t have any updates. I’m hunkering down and working a bunch of overtime through January. And then weather pending hopefully I will start the excavation in February.  In the meantime we are working on planning out the project, getting quotes for windows, cabinets, foundation work, ICFs, and all sorts of stuff.  Lots to do during the month but nothing very exciting. So sit tight until February. .. hopefully!!

Mark