Adding Sub Floor to Floor Repair

After Tony(the carpenter) fixed the floor joists he added the sub flooring you see here; this is in the back of the building.



In the front of the building the floor is just missing. This photo shows what is below the floor, just a crawl space. Remember, this was a church, not a house. The white pipe on the right goes to the septic tank, this will be hooked up in the future.


This photo was taken after the joists were replaced (sorry I did not have my camera when that was being done(note to self:always take your camera)). And if you are wondering how the septic will be hooked up with the floor being installed, Tony left off a piece of sub flooring(not in photo) and will make a trap door for access.

An additional note, the joists you see above are going to be removed as well as the studs to the left. We are going to leave the beam and enough of the studs to safely hold it up or we may add posts to do that. The beam will be for decoration and will not hold any load. This area will be part of our Greatroom.

Work has Begun

Work has finally begun, the first thing being done is the floor in the back of the building has to be repaired. At first, our carpenter Tony, thought we would be able to jack up the floor and just replace the beam. The floor was sagging under the weight of wood that was stacked on it and a cast iron stove. Also, some of the back wall is being framed out.


When he went under the floor he saw that the beams had all cracked in that area and the floor had to be torn up and replaced. We did not count on having to replace this part of the floor. The floor is 3-1/4 " x 3/4" vertical grain Douglas Fir. We are trying to decide what to replace the floor with. Douglas Fir is more expensive than oak and not as durable. We have some decisions to be made; I will let you know what we decide.


This is one of the beams from under the floor. As you can see, it has some rot and is broken.

The Well

This was the well before we bought the house. It is just a hand dug well, I'm guessing it is about 10 feet deep. It was covered by a piece of plywood and set into the foundation.



Here is a photo of the inside of the well.



Before we bought the house we decided to have a well drilled, we figured that we would rather spend a few thousand to determine if we could get potable water than buy a house and find out that we could not get water. The land is small and with the septic being in the front(the well must be 75 feet way)we only had one small spot to drill.


You can see here the process of drilling. The red house next door had to drill 500 feet to get enough water, we hoped for better. It turns out we had to drill 300 feet and got 2 gallons per minute. That was enough for our needs and meets code. The water fills up about 280 feet of the shaft(about 400 gallons) so we have that much to use before we have to rely on the 2 gallons per minute.


The new well before we have to pump hooked up.