the beam team

As of last week, this is what the house looked like on the outside. As you can see, the construction over the new foundation is pretty much finished. The next big step is to start the construction over the 'old' house... on the left in this picture. To that end, Sam has done a lot of demolition inside the house (not covered in this post!), will soon be pouring more foundation, and just this past weekend, he lifted in to place a huge (650lb.) beam which will bear much of the weight of the new structure. I was working this weekend, so I found out he was going to do this when he called me to tell me that he had put a hole in the roof.



By the time I managed to get home, he had managed to get the beam in the living room, and lift one end of it up.


The beam team: Sam, Sam's buddy Junior, Michelle, and me. Sam used the come-along attached to the rafters to winch the beam up- Junior steadied it...



In these pictures it looks like this moved pretty quickly. It didn't. The beam was heavy and the whole process was kind of scary. The calmest of all of us was Sam. Michelle and I were responsible for putting in the supporting vertical beams that you can see on the far right.



Then, we had reached the end of the come-along, so some other means of lifting the beam had to be devised. Naturally Sam had a moment of inspiration, and shortly came back from the garage with...


A jack. He started jacking the beam up.





Of course, the jack wasn't very tall, so we had to rest it on several pieces of wood. Each time the beam was lifted higher, Junior would hold it, and we had to reorganize the wood pieces to be able to fit the jack in, higher. Luckily, Sam had two jacks.




And then, about 2 hours after I got home, it was up! We weren't done yet, though. It had to be pushed to the left a bit, then lifted into some metal brackets that Sam had nailed there.


So Sam climbed onto the roof, and whacked at it with a sledgehammer a bunch of times, moving it a fraction of an inch each time until it was pushed in far enough...

And then we were almost there.


In this next picture, on the left you can almost see the metal bracket the beam had to get into. On the right, under the beam, you can see how they've lifted it by placing smaller pieces of wood underneath...


And here it is, in place!


This beam spans the entire width of the living room. Since I've fallen behind with the blogging, this is the first time you can see where Sam removed half of the ceiling in the living room! You can also see the ad hoc supporting post he built so that the rest of the ceiling wouldn't cave in. Once that was connected to our new beam (which happened later that day, but I don't have a picture), we were able to remove that post.


In the meantime, it was a pretty impressive thing. And this lived there, propping up the living room ceiling, for a couple of weeks!



All done! Time to take a break, and to admire the handiwork!


Once we were done, the four of us went out for some barbecued ribs.
Next: the house gets some color!
Also soon: I slowly but surely will bring you up to date on what's happened over the past 3 months. I'm hoping to do that over several posts. So we'll be time traveling between the present and the past for a bit. I hope that's ok.

It's good to be back!