Well, Tyler and I continued our devastation - uhm, I mean, demolition - of the first floor in preparation for the plumbing work to be done on the second floor. Some of you might be wondering why it is that we needed to demolish the first floor if we're working on the second.Well, where do you think the drains go?

Plus, remodeling done by the previous owners had left a gaping hole in a load bearing wall that was causing the second floor load bearing wall to sag. During previous remodeling, a spiral staircase had been added to the home. To create a doorway to the staircase, several studs in the load bearing wall on the first floor were cut. Normally, this would not have been a major deal since a header would have been put up to distribute the weight that the missing studs would have carried. However, no header was installed and instead the load bearing wall of the second floor was allowed to settle down on the jamb for the double bi-fold door to the spiral staircase. As you can imagine, a piece of 3/4" wood is not nearly as strong as a 2" piece of wood. So, the wall had started to sag - this also helps explain why the bi-fold doors wouldn't close correctly.

This shows how the studs in the load bearing wall were resting on the jamb for the double bi-fold door.	After jacking up a portion of the jamb that was under the double studs, it was easy to see how much the jamb had been sagging.

To correct the support of the loading bearing wall, Tyler and I used floor jacks to lift the weight off of the door jamb and level out the wall. Then, Tyler used some scrap pieces of true 2x4 lumber to match the original wall and re-installed the missing studs. As far as fixes go, this was a relatively easy one.

Floor jacks were used to lift the load bearing wall up so we could work on the supporting walls.

By the end of the weekend, Tyler and I had managed to demolish the ceiling and North wall of the temporary bathroom along with fixing the load bearing wall. The following photos show the before, during and after of the whole event.

Before	During	After