The Broken House III

In my previous post I said that the living room had a flat ceiling. As you can see, it wasn't really all that flat!


Originally, I had decided that it wasn't bad enough to crawl into the attic and fix but the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Plus it was going to be tough to do the skip-trowel texture we have been doing on something that far from flat. Off to the store again. Two 2x6's, some Simpson Strong-tie connectors, some screws, and plumber's tape. Time to install a couple of strongbacks.

It was a little tricky to push the 2x6's up through the garage ceiling into the attic. (I had a nice hole into the attic from the family room but I closed it off a few days prior...) Once I got them there, I had to lift the ceiling joists up to the strongbacks. (Actually, what I did was more like push the strongbacks down to the joist. In hind site, I wondered if I should have used one 2x12 instead of the two 2x6's. Not sure I could have gotten it into the attic, though.) To do this, I used the plumber's tape and a piece of pipe, like so;


The end result looked like this;


I knew from above that I had actually lifted the joist some because before I started, I set the piece of pipe down across the joists and it rolled towards the center. Once I was done, it stayed where I set it! Here's what it now looks like from below;



I did have some popped drywall nails before I started, which is what I was fixing when I decided that the ceiling needed to be flatted. Once I was done installing the strongbacks, I had lots of them so I ended up screwing up the whole ceiling. (Screwing things up is what I do best!!!) Now, with the screw holes filled and the ceiling floated out with drywall mud, we are just about ready to texture.

I had mentioned in an earlier post that I had to fix the sagging roof. I had noticed before we bought the house that there was quite a sag in the roof on the front of the house. Upon inspection in the attic, I discovered that the builders had failed to put any vertical supports up to the rafter strongback between the two front bedrooms. There were a couple of diagonal braces. After putting a jack under the strongback, I removed the diagonal braces and jacked the strongback up 3 1/2"! After installing two vertical braces, I reinstalled a diagonal brace. I still have a bit of a sag over the back bedroom where the rafters are bent after so many years without much support. We will have to deal with that later. Here is a picture from the attic;


The string you see there that I used to level the strongback is now push up by the heater duct. You can also see where I have added insulation over Nancy's office. The rest of the ceiling will get more insulation after we finish working up there.

Also, while I was doing attic projects, I used some leftover foam insulation and silicone to make an insulated attic access hatch;


By the way, those plastic netting scrubber things that ladies like to use in the bath (http://www.amazon.com/Cain-and-Able-Bath-Sponge/dp/B000FUMCPQ) work great for cleaning insulation out of your skin...