Its true that when you renovate a house you never know what you'll find beneath the floor or behind a wall. For today's DIY project, Tyler and I decided to fix the sagging joists on the first floor. We knew from the amount of sag and the instability in the floor - dropping 2 inches when walked upon is not a good architectural detail - that we were going to find stuff to fix. But, even we were surprised by what we found.

When we began pulling up the subfloor, we found the following...

For those of you who aren't crazy enough to renovate a house and are therefore unfamiliar with the Laws of Floor Joists, here are the problems highlighted...

Demoing the above finds was made even more enjoyable by the fact that we weren't sure if any snakes would be waiting for us between the rocks of the old foundation - they're in the siding, so why not the foundation? Thankfully, no snakes were found - and therefore none were harmed - in the removal of this framing debacle. And, the few spiders that were found we safely relocated outside.  Our most interesting find was an old rat's nest that contained a mummified rat - still not sure if finding the deceased critters is better than finding the slithering ones.

So, with the old floor joists and eight legged creatures relocated to the great outdoors, Tyler and I had something that looked a little bit better.

Next came the new joists, can you tell a difference?

So, that is what we did with our Sunday afternoon. Next, the subfloor!!