A few weeks ago, Mom went off to a scientific conference (yay! It was a very cool one) and Dad and I started a major house project.

Many years ago, someone took out a supporting wall in our house. Bad plan. (I know, I can hear you saying, “Whyyyy?” and I don’t know why they did it). The person before us got a massive barn beam and put it in to try to hold up the house. Unfortunately, despite being a massive beam, it’s a 15 foot span and the beam was not large enough. Over the years, it sagged significantly.

So, the first step was to prop it up so we could work.

That was the easy part. Next we had to get the old beam down. 15 feet, about a 10×10 inch beam. Yipe. That’s a lot of weight. So, we decided to take it down in sections.

Which meant cutting a 10×10 beam…

Until the first piece came down (dramatically).

We figure each piece weighed somewhere around 80+ lbs. Which isn’t THAT much except when it’s falling on your head! Second piece (which tried really hard to crush us) followed by the end post.

Next up the third piece, leaving the middle and the right end.

And then the last pieces came down. Yay for a big hole in the ceiling!

So now to put up the new beam. This was fun to plan and perform. Remember, it’s a 15 foot span. And the 10×10 beam didn’t hold it. So we had to put in a bigger beam. In order to do that we made a multipiece beam. 15 foot long 2×12′s, made of a reconstituted wood pressed wood of some sort (similar to plywod, but even stronger and heavier), seven of them next to eachother. They were then bolted together to form one MASSIVE beam. Each one weighed… somewhere around 125 lbs, and had to be eked and edged into position then lifted up and onto the end posts.

Oh! I forgot, before we could get the new beam in, we had to jack up the ceiling some more to get it up high enough to put the new beam in. And flatter (not perfectly flat, it’s still a hundred plus year old house).

But we finally did it.

Next, the scary part… take out the supporting braces. And hope the house (and plaster ceiling) doesn’t fall on our heads…

HURRAY!

Unfortunately, it still wasn’t quite done. We had to make it look pretty, or at least almost pretty.

Drywall and then joint compound. We finished the joint compound around 2 in the morning the night before Mom came home.

We still need to drywall the ceiling, sand down the bumps and put on a bit more compound, then eventually we’ll paint it and redo the walls of the livingroom etc.

Big project. Rewarding though. It’s needed doing since before I was born, but the actual doing is hard to figure out and coordinate.

Back to the dye pots. Polwarth, a bit of Finn, and then… dunno maybe more BFL/Sillk, maybe some merino/angora…

That’s all for now!

~The Gnome