Summary

• Lots of progress
• Subfloor is installed on first floor
• First wall framed
• Garage steel beams both adjusted to level out the floor
• Gravel delivered, installed in garage floor and compacted
• Lots of demo work to install the last steel beam
• Steel beam prepped and installed
• Bathroom modified to “open air” feeling :)
• Kept bathroom functional

Hi All!

We had an awesome week and got a lot done!  But man it was HOT this week.  Turns out working on the southside of the house inside the ICF walls is like working in an oven. The walls block the breeze and man was it hot!  

Unfortunately on Monday I was still dealing with the glue fiasco and had to go buy some from the store since  my amazon order still hadn’t arrived. I bought two cans.. and of course, one of the two cans was a dud .. ugh. Anyhow I got started on the subfloor but couldn’t finish right away so we shifted and framed our first wall! That was exciting. It is the door wall that will be the door for the pantry off of the kitchen. Sure helps you feel the space better when you start putting up walls.

On Tuesday one of two cases (second case is STILL lost and I’m STILL dealing with this) of glue finally arrived! So we were able to finish up the subfloor. It is so fun to have all that space even if it is only in the construction phase. 

On Wednesday, we had to take a step back and verify the height of the second floor all the way around the ICF walls. Mark, my neighbor bought a laser level (not sure if he bought it for him or just for me… but he has used it ) and it was just in time! Using that I found out the steel beams in the garage were 1-2″ low. So we had to step back and shim the beams by lifting up one side at a time. It was hot and frustrating, but I am glad we did it. The second story floor is going to be a lot more level now!

Thursday the gravel for our garage floor was delivered. So with Mark’s little john deere tractor, I moved the first layer of gravel in and Karianne finished spreading it out with the rake. It was actually quite brutal work and was impressed Karianne stuck it out and did so much! (there is a fun story from our time dating that involved hard physical labor and cookies, if you don’t know the story ask sometime I love to tell it ).  After the first level was in we went and placed the LVL ledger above the kitchen and dinning and than mounted all the joist hangers there.

Friday afternoon/evening we rented a reverse plate gravel compactor and worked our butts off in the HEAT again. We did 3 more lifts of the gravel bringing it all in and compacting it. Again Karianne was out raking it and working so hard. Having her help has been game changing. I can get SOO much more done when she’s involved. We might have wore her out a bit that Friday but she did not complain!  Luckily, once again we were able to use Mark’s laser level. We put a 2 degree slope on the level and then we were able to make a nice constant sloped floor.  

Saturday morning I ran the compactor around the garage another 3 times and then took it back to the rental store. Then when I came back we got after it.

The goal was to get the last steel beam in place and patch the bathroom up in an operational state. This was not a small feat. First I had to do a lot of demo to do and when ever you do demo on this old house, you find a TON of dead bugs. As fun as that is, it always makes me nervous to expose more of the house to the elements but we didn’t have much of a choice. So I cut up the roof above the window pop out and cut out the pop out section of the bathroom floor (I even cut out all of the cantilevered floor joists that were holding up the outer wall, and somehow it didn’t all come crashing down  ). 

After that we had to prep the steel beam by bolting an LVL to the side of the beam (the LVL was just a hair to tall but no worries, Mark has a planer which made it easy to take 1/4″ off so it would fit in nice and snug). The LVL will be used to hold up the existing floor joists in the original house with face mount hangers.  And then we had to place the beam. This took much longer than I wanted but the excavator couldn’t exactly reach where it needed to go. So we got it close and did some old fashion adjusting with some wood studs and some persuasion from our sledge hammer. It worked pretty well all things considering. Its kind of a tense operation, I have to operate the excavator and fly basically totally blind with the ICF walls in the way. So with our airpods in Karianne guides me in over the phone. Its a great exercise in communication between spouses  .

After the beam was in time was running short but we got  the hangers up quickly and then installed the first five joists for the second floor! And with that we put down a piece of OSB and then filled the gap with insulation. And with that we met our goal! The bathroom was still operational and mostly “sealed” off. It was a lot of work, and I can’t believe we got it all done. 

It was a great fun week!  Can’t wait for this week. On Tuesday we should be getting our garage floor poured!! So exciting!

Mark

P.S. I have lots of floor joists and subfloor to install this weekend which is a fun and satisfying part of the process… just in case anyone is interested