Just in the last two weeks, I've been pretty busy at my Diplomacy and Atheism Compound°. I got power hooked up to the new shop I've been building, shoveled a yard of sand to backfill the poco's work pit at the power pole, bent and hung 35 sticks of 3/4" EMT to pull wire to lighting fixtures and outlets, wired up 13 outlets and two of the 14 light fixtures (enough for now), pulled a fat bundle of #6 wire through 75 feet of conduit to wire up the water heater for the shop sink, and started soldering up the radiant boiler panel.
In the middle of this, I had to head over to my brother's house for 16 hours over two days of ridiculously shitty giant beam lifting. His house was built in 2006 by a man who should be strapped into a perpetual nut-kicking machine for the rest of his life. Either there was a failure at the plan review stage to allow such a rickety structure to be approved or a failure at the inspection stage to catch cheating the plans or both. Either way, the guy had a death wish or something and framed a workout room (treadmill, weight set, etc.) over the garage using the flimsiest storage trusses I've ever seen: 2x8 lower cord for a 13' span and the rest all 2x4 (with only a single cross-webbing), and on 24" centers. The middle of his garage ceiling sagged a good two inches. His 16' garage door header is also two plies short of what should have been there, so the garage door header--in a load bearing wall under a second story--sags in the middle so much that the siding above it is popping out. Sheetrock all the way on the other side of the house is pulling out the nails (too cheap for screws...), and the whole place is a mess.
Engineer specified MASSIVE LVL beams landing on posts buried in the stud cavities to bring the floor back up to the right height and keep it there. These things are 18" tall by 29' long after being cut to length. Each 1.75" ply weighs about 200 pounds by my guess, and I cut them to exactly fit inside the walls, so moving them around was a motherfucker (think maneuvering a couch down an enclosed staircase, only the couch is almost 30 feet long and weighs 200 pounds). The rear beam--at five plies thick, this thing is nearly nine inches wide and weighs about a thousand pounds when screwed together (using about 50 very large and expensive screws)--had to be supported by a bracket on one side due to proximity to a door. This beam carrier is the largest that Simpson makes, has to be special ordered, weighs 25 pounds, is held up by over 70 screws, and cost over $200.
Anyway, we had to screw on that beam carrier bracket, lift all five plies of the beam up into it, jack the other end of the beam up into place, screw the beam together, install the post under the free end (a nailed-together stack of five 2x6es), hole the posts for wire runs (which had to be pulled and re-wired), and then start all over with the middle four-ply beam. I hurt everywhere for four days after that, and only seriously heavy drinking last night finally pushed me over edge to feeling normal again.
Some time in the next couple of months, we're going to use a third such beam as a temporary support to hold the front wall up while we tear all the framing out and re-frame it with the proper sized garage door header and another post to hold a fourth, perpendicular beam. It's going to be a fucking mess, and the bids to re-side the house afterward are coming in at about $65K. My brother and I have matching soul-crushing second mortgages to pay for our shitty house renovations, so we've got that going for us. Which is nice.
I'm taking a day off and going fishing next week just from reading this. Holy fuck.
That chunk of gray steel in the bottom left corner is the huge and expensive bracket that the back beam would eventually hang from on one end.
If this were new construction, this job wouldn't have been the end of the world. But lifting these beams in a fishbowl, with a lot of shit in the way, was what made it difficult. The presence of that air conditioning line, for instance, meant that end had to be lifted up first, slid into place over the air conditioning line (one ply at a time, or it would have been impossible), braced underneath with temporary Oh Shit Boards (technical term), then lifted at the other end after wiring was disconnected and gotten out of the way.
That stack of LVLS--two whopping beams--was over $3000 in make-you-want-to-murder-your-builder.
had surgery today - so i am a one finger pecker 9run with that0
goat poop successfyllu gathered and fedexed to some gov official in Baton Rouge. oxy kickin in big time, typing might br like drunk poasting during a Utah game.
had surgery today - so i am a one finger pecker 9run with that0
goat poop successfyllu gathered and fedexed to some gov official in Baton Rouge. oxy kickin in big time, typing might br like drunk poasting during a Utah game.
had surgery today - so i am a one finger pecker 9run with that0
goat poop successfyllu gathered and fedexed to some gov official in Baton Rouge. oxy kickin in big time, typing might br like drunk poasting during a Utah game.
Comments
That chunk of gray steel in the bottom left corner is the huge and expensive bracket that the back beam would eventually hang from on one end.
If this were new construction, this job wouldn't have been the end of the world. But lifting these beams in a fishbowl, with a lot of shit in the way, was what made it difficult. The presence of that air conditioning line, for instance, meant that end had to be lifted up first, slid into place over the air conditioning line (one ply at a time, or it would have been impossible), braced underneath with temporary Oh Shit Boards (technical term), then lifted at the other end after wiring was disconnected and gotten out of the way.
That stack of LVLS--two whopping beams--was over $3000 in make-you-want-to-murder-your-builder.
goat poop successfyllu gathered and fedexed to some gov official in Baton Rouge. oxy kickin in big time, typing might br like drunk poasting during a Utah game.
trying to fix is tuffer yhan trying to ytpe.
edit: tug might make more sense four a few dats