Kitchen Construction (weekend of 2005-08-27)

Welcome back to another episode of work-your-butt-off! (or at least OUR butts off!) After too many busy weekends with no time for house-work, we're back. Dan's back again, and we once again broke speed records. Dan came up Wednesday night. Shane and Dan worked Thursday and Friday, Sarah joined on Sat and Sunday. In one weekend (plus 3 days, 5 total) we did all the framing and sub-floor construction for the kitchen that took a month (4 weekends, 8 days) for the living room. Again, we knew better what we were doing, we had help, and, though there was more square area for the kitchen + hall-way floor we constructed, the overall design was simpler. Partly this was because the area was square, no nook, no fireplace to make things difficult. Also partly because, knowing what worked and what didn't with the living room, we did some things better.

Before we could build, though, we still had some destruction to finish up. That took most of Thursday. Here is a picture with most of that destruction done. The only thing left in that picture is the center beam, which was also completely replaced. Compare this picture to the last pictures from kitchen-destruction-day. There was still a surprisingly amount of stuff to remove!

Once we'd removed all the old stuff, we could build and install the new center beam. This took most of Friday - that center beam is a pain to construct. The main problem is its 4 bolts that must go through 4 boards and everything must be perfectly straight. That's 16 holes that must all line up within an 1/8". For the hall-way, we also had to construct a "side" beam. This beam was considerably simpler to make - just nail to 2x10s together and call it good.

Aha! Looking at the pictures, I remember we did the East, inner wall re-framing on Thursday as we destroyed and removed the old joists. It turns out we replaced or augmented more than 90% of the framing studs in the West and East walls of both the living room and kitchen. These are the walls the ceiling sits on. Below are two pictures of all the framing re-work we did in the kitchen. The Left picture shoes the studs we added in parallel to the existing studs. Removing the old ones would have required redoing all the exterior wall - something we didn't want to do, so installing the new studs in parallel seemed like a good solution for re-enforcing the wall without doing a lot of work. That west wall (left picture) wasn't actually done until we had finished with the joists.

The right picture shows all the studs we replaced for the inner wall - all of them. We also discovered that yet another span was not properly headered, so we installed our 3rd header. Getting pretty good at those ;).

Note, every red arrow shows a stud that was installed:

Those pictures show the joists already in... getting ahead of myself :). Doing all the joists took Saturday and Sunday, and we didn't quite finish. The plan was similar to the living room - two sets of joists. One set for the West half of the kitchen and one for the East half. The main difference was the East joists were longer - long enough to also be the hallway floor. This seemed like an easy way to get the hallway done at the same time as the kitchen floor. We would have done the same in the living room, but the entry-way floor, unfortunately, has to be 8" lower due to the lower ceiling. Anyway, the long easy joists were a bit hard to do than anticipated because they had to sit flat on 3 points - the center beam, the side-beam, and the foundation they spanned. Of course that wouldn't have been had if the foundation was level ;).

Below you can see the joists as they were at the end of the weekend. In the upper-right picture you can see the long joists - before they were installed. Actually, we were installing one at a time, but because those long joists were such a pain to get properly balanced, we had to take them out and trim, adjust, and even swap more than once to get it all right.

In the pictures below the joists are in and the sub-sub-floor is almost done. One key part is missing, can you see it? Hint: It has to do with the center beam (compare with the living-room floor's center beam).

One of the things that went "wrong" on the living room floor was the joists weren't straight. That made installing the sub floor a major pain - it required cutting every sheet of sub-floor with non-square angles. This time, we did it right. Using an idea from our framing book, we made a "key" - a piece of 2x4 with notches cut out at the correct spacing for every joist. We constantly checked and rechecked to make sure our joists were in the right place using this key. The end result was all our joists were square, parallel, and straight. This made the sub-floor work the following week much easier.

We finished up the joist-work without Dan in the week-day evenings. In the picture below you can see our "key" and the final missing part of the joists. Did you figure it out? Its the joist-ties that connect the West and East joists together over the center beam.

The following weekend, Dan came up from Corvallis, OR (4hour drive) once again to help us install the sub floor. It only took a day and came out looking much more regular and well deigned than the sub floor in the living room. See the Kitchen Sequences for pictures of the final results.

Below, a few picts of Sarah and Shane at work :).