We raised, if not the roof, the second floor of our house by a centimetre or so. (Not by partying, sadly.)
Safety-Averse Former Owner (SAFO) decided that cutting great huge chunks out of the joists was a good idea — hey, why not, just because they’re structural doesn’t mean you really need them, right?
— which made the upstairs bathroom & back bedroom kinda sproingy. We’d like to tile the bathroom, so we needed to make things more rigid so our tiles won’t crack. The large metal pole on the right in the photo below
(looking up into the bathroom from the equally-destroyed downstairs kitchen) is one of several similar poles holding several joists up a bit, levelling them with the other joists, while we screwed 2x8s to the worst-destroyed joists. The photo below is looking down into the kitchen from the upstairs.
It’s immense fun to push on a hydraulic jack and — with one hand’s easy effort — feel the entire second floor shift upwards. Highly recommended.
And then it was nearing 11pm and since we figured the neighbours might not enjoy the deafening thunkathunkathunka of the impact driver at that hour, we broke for some Veuve Cliquot.
Today D. is finishing up making things level and putting some thick plywood subfloor down.
Soon the plumbers will arrive and rip out absolutely every vestige of the old plumbing and will give us nice, new, properly-installed, non-leaking, non-corroded pipes and drains, yay!
Maddy’s very excited because all of this means that she will soon have a white bathtub in which she’ll be able to see the pretty colours in her bath salts (which aren’t apparent in our hideous old blue tub).