Wow. So, we’re working on the loan to finish the house, but we also didn’t want to lose a month or more while that happens and the builder had a crew available, so we moved forward with framing. We signed the contract on a Thursday, I cleared all of the debris and tools out of the second floor and attic over the weekend, the crew started on Monday, and they finished the following week Tuesday.
What I’m saying is that, in seven days of work, the framing of the second floor and attic was completed. This included the structural work of putting in beams and columns and adding blocking to the outside walls to support the new lowered joists, replacing the subfloor on the second floor, framing the second floor interior walls, the attic subfloor, building stairs up to the attic, adding the collar ties that make the ceiling of the attic rooms, and finally, framing the interior walls in the attic.
If I had done this work myself, with assistance from friends and family, a rough guess is that it would have taken about a year. That actually makes sense, given that a crew of eight carpenters working for seven days is 56 days worth of work, and a generous estimate is that, on average, I find time to work on the house one day a week.
There are a couple of things that they either didn’t do or did differently than I’d prefer that I intend to simply fix myself, like adding exterior wall fire blocking to the second floor and tweaking a couple of closet walls in the attic where the slope of the roof didn’t exactly align with the drawings. Hopefully I’ll get that done in the next few weeks while we’re working on the loan. That’s a whole other story that I’ll put into its own post.
March 11, 2019 at 4:53 pm
I like your stairs and your lego room best. Things look amazingly straight and plumb for an old house. Did you keep all the old floor joists, reinforce them, or replace them completely?
March 13, 2019 at 9:28 pm
That was a quantum leap forward for your project. With the walls framed in you can really see what the finished house will be. BTW, our family lived for many years in Scottsdale, AZ and had three solatubes in our 1 story townhouse. The light that they added made a dramatic improvement. One was in a windowless hall bath and my visiting brother came out of it asking how to turn off the light. There was also negligible heat transfer.
March 15, 2019 at 12:27 pm
Thanks! I leveled the existing first floor joists when I re-did the subfloor. They leveled out the existing second floor joists when they put in new subfloor, and then we replaced the attic joists with TJIs, since they were originally 2x6s.
March 18, 2019 at 9:21 pm
The multi level chandelier is going to be amazing. How much did all of this framing cost?
March 21, 2019 at 10:56 am
Including the demo of the remaining wall and subfloor, labor and materials was about 25k. There’s a lot of structural work that drove that, LVL beams and PSL columns that are carrying load down to the beams below or down the walls to the foundation.
March 22, 2019 at 10:41 am
If you would recommend the framers, can you email me their contact information? I have also gotten to the “Can’t someone else do it?” stage.
February 6, 2020 at 11:37 am
Hello! Just checking in to see if you have made any progress… It has been an interesting remodel and more realistic than 99% out there. Don’t get discouraged(: