Beam Insertion Part 1 (Safety First)

Friday seems like a long time ago but after work I headed home and got ready and Jon came over. We made a list of things we needed and made plans and got acclimated to the ~120F heat in the attic. Then we ran to Home Depot for some supplies and then to Jon’s house for some metal work.

We broke out some of Jon’s toys and and some metal and started building hangers. (I’ll warn you right now I have very few pictures from the weekend and those I do have are from my cell phone so I’ll cover the weekend as best as I can but I’ll need to take some real pictures tonight and update tomorrow) We needed a big hanger to connect the 2 big beams and a couple of smaller hangers to hang the existing stiff-backer from.

We took the plan of keeping the house from falling down pretty serious and went overboard on everything to make it stronger then when we started.

Once we had all our metal cut and welded and full of screw holes we were pretty much set for the night. I headed home and got started on moving things around, setting things up for Saturday and prepping for the big day. Amanda, Alli and Jon decided to come spend the night in the AC. I got to bed on time to prep for an early morning. My alarm went off at 4:50am. I got dressed and cooked up some breakfast burritos and coffee. Jon and I ate around 5 and then got busy in a nice cool attic. We added some temporary support boards in the family room then started removing things in the attic. The big beam as pretty close to it’s final spot but the beam we put in when we took out the first wall was in the way and some supports going to the roof.

So we removed all this stuff first

and set up the spot for the big beam to go.

We temporarily rolled it into place and braced it up. It is so big, 32 feet long, 2 ft tall and this thick.

(I’m out of pictures at this point so I’ll continue the story tomorrow. I really believe we did some pretty awesome stuff in a pretty miserable place and ended up with some really nice results and I don’t want to leave things out)

Things from this weekend besides the Kitchen Remodel project (bullets):

– Heath and I are excited to have a new roommate. Felicia got a new job and is going to live in basement for a bit.
– Heath and Pumpkin are home from FL. and it sounds like they had a really good trip considering they had to go for a funeral.
– Sunday night I took a break from projects and went to Brooksiders to have dinner and celebrate Felicia’s birthday with some friends.
–  At Brooksider’s Tony and I ordered double cheeseburgers and both received quadruple cheeseburgers.
– After dinner last night I opened an experimental unfiltered cherry wheat beer and it was good but flat, so I learned a dehydrated cherry in a beer will not take the place of priming sugar.
– I made an Italian java stout spent grains bread last night and it smelled and tasted great.
– Heath, Felicia and I watched Jackass 3D last night before bed and somehow no one puked.