Making and installing beams

The last week and half has been taken up with making the floor beams and installing them. The beams in this house are 15 foot long sandwiches made from two 2x10s with a 2x4 nailed in between them. Our house has 22 of these beams on the first floor, so there was a lot of fabrication to be done. It was a rainy week and we didn’t have a sheltered work area near the house site, so we took a couple of days to disassemble a 22x14 hoop greenhouse down by the road and move it up close to the house site. This gave us a good dry place to build and store beams.

The next step was to install the beams on the sill plates. We started with the one story section because it was simpler than the two story section. The beams are about 40 inches apart (on center) on average, but we made adjustments here and there to account for slight variations in their width.

Getting the beams up onto the sill plates was quite a chore because they are so heavy. It’s possible to do it with two people but it’s much easier with three. We did the one story section with just the two of us. We set up two ladders on opposite sides of the house, near where the ends of a beam would be placed. I would hold one end of the beam while my partner would climb a ladder holding the other end of the beam and place it on the sill plate. Then she would hurriedly come down and repeat the lifting on the other ladder while I held that end of the beam over my head.

The second story section was much more difficult for several reasons. First, five of the beams had ends that were not supported by foundation walls, at the junction between the one story section and the two story section. For those five beam ends that were placed in this gap, we had to make support posts and brace them to keep them from falling over. This took a lot of careful measuring and planning, and some tricky work with ladders to set beams on the posts. We stretched a string across the gap as a continuation of the chalk line we had laid out on the sill plates to ensure accurate placements of the beams.

There were also some fiddly bits having to do with spacing two of the beams far enough apart for the staircases, and making sure there was a one inch space between the one story section and the two story section.

We’re still far from having a roof over our heads, but somehow having the beams in place made it seem much more like a real house than did the bare foundation.