We just bought a new house, and new that there were some joists that needed to be sistered because of improperly drilled holes for the baseboard heat pipes. As we sistered the joists the 1/2" of sag came out except in two of them, which were sagged much greater. After further inspection these joists were one either side of a wall that was load bearing and never supported when the house was built back in '74.
I had a structural engineer come out and look at this, we are putting in some LVLs. Everything of course always looks better on paper. All the plumbing and other stuff for the 2nd floor runs directly through this wall into the basement. See the photo below. The sheetrock from the first floor room above has been removed and I've attached that photo as well.
Our plan for next weekend is to remove all the plumbing that is in the bay under the load bearing wall. We'll cut it off from 1st floor. Once that bay is cleared out we'll then install the new LVLs.
After we get the load bearing wall supported properly we'll need to rerun all the plumbing and such back down to the basement.
One though that we had was to build out a 2x4, or 2x6 wall. The thought behind was to give a little extra room for the 3" waste pipe and possibly move the central vacuum to the other side of the kitchen entrance. Of course doing this you'll loose some width to the room and the entrance to the kitchen is now ~10" and may look odd.
Another person suggested building out a box about a foot high and 4"deep to contain all the plumbing. My wife has already shot that idea down.
I'm looking to see if there are other ideas people have.
Thanks,
Steve D.
basement plumbing
first floor wall
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