I think I’m 2 weeks behind – so let me catch up. The weekend before last Ryan and his dad sheetrocked the master bedroom (yay!) – i think we have 1 piece left that is waiting on me re-wiring the switch because they cut out the sheetrock that had the switch installed (it had an old work box, needs to be changed to a new work box).
In the meantime I was spackling the bathroom most evenings and finished that last Thursday – plus our tile arrived for the bathroom on Thursday too. So we were thinking – ready for tile prep this weekend but alas Ryan was concerned about the engineering loads to hold the marble tile without it at some point cracking or popping. He did some calculations and realized we had a few issues – a) our floor joists weren’t even 2x10s – they are like 8 1/2″ wide not 9 1/2. Then the subfloor plywood is not structural flooring plywood. Finally the hardi backer we had down which is not structural is also not recommended for Kerdi because they don’t bond well. Plus there’s major sag in the floor towards the middle – and leveling would just add more weight. The hardi backer we put down and it was glued so taking it up was no easy thing.
The plan :
- Take up all the flooring (hardi and plywood) in the bathroom.
- Jack up the floor from underneath to reduce a bit of the sag
- Add 2x6s on the flat to the bottom of each joist – making a T beam essentially – they are glued and screwed – we lose 1.5″ of ceiling height downstairs in that room but gain a LOT of strength to the floor
- Laminate each side of the floor joists with plywood (we do this a lot to add strength – works great)
- Put down 3/4 structural plywood then a layer of 1/2 that we will then use the Kerdi system on – including the underlayment on the floor
This was quite a project and due to the rough in plumbing being done – we had to pull that out and the water lines will have to be re-run. Luckily the drain lines were fine – except for taking out the toilet flange – they were mostly waiting to be installed anyhow. So a little re-plumbing has to be done – but we have a much more structurally sound bathroom floor and our tiles should not crack.
So far we got steps 1-4 done above – plywood isn’t down yet because we have to take down the jacks (so waiting for glue to fully cure) – then they’ll shim the plywood as they install it to get it more level. I assume this will happen a bit next weekend.
In good news the sheetrock held up surprisingly well and we hadn’t sanded yet at least! So there’s a crack over the door – which is very expected since that’s center of the room – which will be repaired once the new floor is in. Then we just have to patch that one crack, sand/prime/paint the rest. Then we can move on to tiling!
We also got the boat out of the water for the season and cleaned off really well – I think the weather is warm and sunny tomorrow so once the rug dries we’ll finish winterizing it and cover the boat then move it to store it over by the driveway (it’s by the hose right now) 🙂
Finally some pictures of what our office ceiling looks like now – and you can see through the floor joists to the bathroom – nothing like going backward in a renovation to move forward in a better direction!
2x6s along the bottom of each joist and it’s still jacked up
You can see the bathroom upstairs – spackling done – and the plywood laminated on the sides
We will continue this across the rest of the office – to support our bedroom floor which we’re not actually worried about but for consistency. We are going to pull up the 1/2 inch particle board in the master bedroom and replace with 1/2 or 3/4 plywood as a better subfloor for our hardwood.
We also purchased another 750 board feet of Cherry lumber – milled 40 years ago – going to have it turned into flooring for our bedroom and the playroom! That should be getting delivered this weekend and we’ll take it next week to the mill for planing. We need to get more still – for the rest of the downstairs but when you get a deal on good Cherry and we’re going with Cherry throughout – we had to jump at it!