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Endsleigh specialise in Home Contents Insurance for people in the UK

To jack or not to jack

Foundation

It’s 8:00am Saturday morning, I’ve just finished carrying a couple hundred pound I-beam into the basement, with much needed help from my father, to use as a linear support for jacking joists back up flush with the girders and sublfooring and replacing sagging ledgers. We began at what so far seems to be the more difficult area to work in, the secret cistern. One end of the cistern is open enough to slide up and into on my belly. We utilized that same opening to rest one end of the I-beam on while the other end sat upon 6×6 pressure treated cribbing. The I-beam was now only about 11 inches from the bottom of the joists, allowing for a minimum distance to take up between the bottle jacks and joists. We began at the far right corner of the cistern, working our way into the middle of the floor and out of the cistern. The joists needed to come up only 1/4 of an inch or so; the real job was resecuring the ledger to the girder that the joists were notched into and then adding extra support to tie the joists into the girder. Large lag bolts were used to pull the ledger back to the girder and smaller lag bolts to “toe nail” the joists. One faulty bottle jack and about 4 nail holes in my head later, we had replaced and/or resecured 6 of the many ledgers that need attention. Thanks again Daddio!

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