One Weekend Down

Nothing quite like a major structural project to start things off...

We knew up front that there were some issues with the bonus room above the garage, but we weren't exactly sure what was going on. Luckily for us, Leslie's father has a lot of experience with seemingly every aspect of home improvement and he was willing to come down and help us. Leslie's mother also came down to help Leslie clean the house.

The only real indicators of the issue were a crack running diagonally from one of the corners of the window in the bonus room and what appeared to be a sagging floor as visible from below in the garage. Our guess was that the bonus room may have been added above the garage after the home was constructed, which could be an issue if the framing wasn't sized to support a living space like that. Well, luckily that guess was wrong.

We started by digging into the wall where the beam is housed above the two-bay garage door. It quickly became apparent that there was an issue with water coming in. The beam was soaked through and rotting - never a good sign. We then proceeded to strip the siding off the front of the house to find the source of the problem. There were a few different places with issues, but it basically came down to poor water management. A lack of flashing here, a gap in the channel here... things like that. We did our best to seal everything up with urethane foam and caulk and will be sure to do a better job than they did at the bottom of the siding above the garage door when we replace all that.

Taking the House Apart

Water Damage

We may have found the problem and done some patching, but the damage that had already been done still needs to be corrected. The water had damaged the Glulam beam and caused the floor above it to sink by a few inches in the middle. Our plan is to jack up the floor with temporary supports, cut out the old beam, and replace it with a new one. We began this process and have the temporary supports in place and are slowly (but not too slowly) raising the floor. We first cut holes in the ceiling to expose a few of the floor joists, then attached some 2x4s to the joists to hold the temporary beam in place while we got the jacks under it. I'm now raising those jacks up a little bit at a time to get the floor to where it needs to be.

Temporary Beam Supports

Ready to Install the Jacks

Raise the Roof!

The good news is that, as I said earlier, our original guess as to the issue being the framing for the second floor was incorrect. During our investigation we discovered that the beam was adequate (before being damaged, obviously) and that the joists were correctly sized (2x10s @ 12" OC). This means that the beam, although it is a lot of work, is our worry and not the entire floor structure. So at least that came out well. Also, the whole process went pretty smoothly without any real setbacks (like dropping the beam on someone's head or the whole garage collapsing). All in all, not a bad start to things.