Dealing with Damaged Joists
Most, if not all of us, have come across a moment when we ask ourselves the question – “What were they thinking?” Often that moment comes when you are doing a home renovation and you see the workmanship of some previous owner or contractor. We had MANY of those moments while renovating our 115-year-old historic property in Bethlehem, PA.
Once the removal of the original lathe and plaster on ALL the ceilings in the house was done – and the dust had settled (literally) – we were easily convinced we had done the right thing. Especially since we exposed issues in practically every room, but most dramatically in the ceiling of the kitchen.
The rear of the house is basically our plumbing stack – First floor Kitchen – Two Bathrooms on the second floor – and on the third floor we had plans to install our master bathroom. What we discovered that whoever had done the previous plumbing renovations (this could have been done when they installed the indoor plumbing) had taken the easy way out and simply cut holes in almost every joist to run the new plumbing pipes.
YIKES! Thank goodness the lawyers, who rented the offices in the house before we purchased, had not taken a bath in the 2nd floor Men’s Bathroom – or the tub might have ended up in the middle of the kitchen! This issue is much more common than one would think. Unskilled contractors or homeowners will often take the easy way out not understanding, or caring, about the structural issues caused by their decisions.
Not only were we planning on adding a third floor bathroom, but I was planning on using a good deal of porcelain tile and natural stone in my design of the 3 upstairs bathrooms. The additional “load” in conjunction with the compromised joists meant we had to come up with a solution to not only repair the joists, but add structural support, as well.
Our solution was to add “sisters” - a 2x10 added to either side of the existing compromised joists. Because of the previous plumber’s disregard for any sort of structural integrity we had to do this process on EVERY joist in the kitchen ceiling. For good measure we also added a LAM beam in the center of the span for additional structural support. (I’ll explain how we turned this into a decorative element in a future blog.)