Oh boy.
I peeled off the paneling to find a rude surprise:
Anyways, here's a couple up close and gritty pics of the worst of the damage:
Its in rough shape and definitely needs some love. With everything exposed, I was finally able to make a bit of a plan, and grab some materials.
(That's that truckload of lumber I mentioned in the last post).
Step 6: Cut your remaining supports. Studs are 16" on center usually, in my case I simply studded under each rafter for max strength. I like to cut my studs 1/8" long and hammer them into place to give a little bit of pre load on the wall so nothing sags. If you do this, be careful to measure and cut all your studs first, and then do them all at once. If you cut a stud 1/8" long, hammer it in place, measure the next, add 1/8", hammer into place, rinse, repeat, you can see how you'd get out of square pretty quickly.
Congrats, your ceiling is now supported and you can safely remove the old wall to ready it for replacement.
(Note the fresh scab stud I've tossed under the other section of wall to help support it during this repair. The top and bottom plates were still good, so I was able to just toss an extra stud in for additional strength)
So, this place has been added onto twice from its original footprint. That makes for some bearing walls in some interesting places.
After stripping back a bunch of the roof around the valley, I uncovered some water damage and associated rot in several of the rafters, both in the old section of the house and in the new section, and, associated with that damage, damage to the walls underneath the rafters as well.
So, time to open up the walls and see what we can see. Here is some before pics inside the third bedroom, the one chunk of torn off panel came off when I pushed the ceiling in from the roof. These pics are taken with my back against the wall, the exterior of the house on the right where the window is. Note the location of the door and closet opening.
That uh,
That's a load bearing wall. Or, it's supposed to be one. It's what all of the rafters for the old section of the house are sitting on.
Apparently the previous owner's renovation motto was "Load bearing? I barely know her!"
It looks like he thought "I want a closet and a door there, I'm just gonna bark some holes wherever I damn well please and toss some 2x4s over the top of the openings" if you look carefully there isn't even cripple studs around the closet opening, the closet door frame itself is the only thing supporting that span. Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo that's less than ideal. Or rather it was less than ideal when it was built. Now, however many years of water leaking on it, not only is it bad, the post that supports that entire side of the closet is rotted and it's pushed past "less than ideal" and landed squarely in, well, abysmal.
There's also some water damage on the exterior wall, but it's fairly minimal. I will still be rectifying it, but it's considerably less concerning. In the pic below you'll see the T junction where the old exterior wall which is now an interior wall joins the now outside wall. Because of the design of the roof and it's addition, the wall on the rightmost side of the T is non load bearing, and the other two walls are both load bearing.
I left it in that shape for the day, with the help of my lovely wife, cleaned up all the demolition results. The next day, back and ready for a fresh start, this is what I dove into. Please forgive the inconsistency of the picture angles, I'm still learning, and I'm better at fixing houses than I am at taking pictures.
That was a _very_ long preamble to get to the meat of the post: How to repair a rotten and inadequately constructed even before it rotted, load bearing wall.
Thank you to my dad for teaching me this, along with most of the other skills you'll see demonstrated along this journey, when he and I completed a full gut and rebuild of a different house a couple of years back. If you learn anything reading this, you actually learned it from him, not me.
Step 1: Determine how your floor is supported. My floor joists run the same direction as my rafters do in the old section of the house, which is exactly what we want.
Step 2: Clear out the floor and ceiling a foot or so away from the present load bearing wall. For me the floor was already stripped and the ceiling just needed it's tiles removed to expose the rafters. I elected to push my scab wall a bit further than a foot to get to some of the better wood on the rotten rafters.
Step 3, cut 2 lengths of wood as long as the wall you are replacing, for me it's the 9' wide that the room is. Real walls have double plates, but as this is just a temp support while the old stuff is removed and replaced by the real wall, so one top and bottom is adequate. I used 2x6 for a little extra load support on my questionable condition wood.
Step 4: Screw or nail (again, real walls use nails not screws, but for a temporary scab wall, screws are adequate and make disassembly easier) your top plate to the rafters. Use a plumb bob to get a straight shot down and screw your bottom plate to the floor.
Step 5: measure your two end studs, cut, and screw in place. They may not be the exact same length, cause, you know, old houses, little is square in them. (Finally, a picture!)
Step 7: Screw a long board on a diagonal to make a couple triangles and keep this guy sturdy so it won't just fold under load. I had a 10 footer handy so I slapped that in there. Doesn't have to be fancy.
With my scab wall in place taking the load, I started in the bad corner and started removing the rotting posts. Managed to get 2 out of 3 ripped out before my lovely wife came home with pizza, so for now, this is how it'll sit.
All going well, I'll get the other post removed tomorrow and I can get to properly rebuilding these walls with non rotted wood, in a way that safely supports the loads present and meets building codes (spoilers, that unnecessary closet is going bye bye) but for now, it's considerably past my bedtime, so, goodnight :)
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