With the basement concrete set, Week 31 starts out with a big lumber delivery. Our carpentry crew met us on site to bring in the lumber and start building out the framing. After all of the demo and underground work, its certainly exciting to finally see the layout start to take shape!

Our carpenter started with framing the perimeter of the building and then worked his way towards the interior spaces. As part of this work, he demoed the remaining old windows and framed out rough openings for the future new windows. He also took out the original front stairwell that lead from the first floor to the basement, cut away some of the flooring on the first floor, to install a new stairwell that will be built to today’s codes and standards (the old stairwell was too steep and left as little as six feet of clearance at its low point).

As the framing starting taking shape, we found that the mason didn’t take down the back wall brick wall as far as he was supposed to. As the back hallway took shape, it ended 12 inches into the existing masonry. So to start Week 32, our mason came back out and cut the remaining 12 inch portion of the wall away and removed the brick so that we can avoid any awkward bends and angles.

On the first and second floor, our carpenter assessed the floor boards to determine which, if any, can be salvaged and restored. It turns out that the water damage to the flooring was too severe in about 50% of the flooring on the 2nd floor to be able to save it. The first floor was in better shape, but the flooring in the kitchen area was too damaged as well. This flooring was ripped up and new sub-flooring was installed in order to evenly install the new floor in the future.

Finally, with the framing nearing completion at the end of Week 32, our carpenter took a hydrolic lift into the basement and jacked up the middle of the building about an inch or two and installed several lvl beams for support. This was necessary because the basement columns had settled over time and the building was sagging in towards the middle. The lvl beams, resting on the masonry beams, will give added support to the floors above and allow them to lay nice and level.