Remember the kitchen floor? Remember the chimney? No? Too late.

Well, you can always check out the past entries. But regardless, they're history...

...leaving me to face the fact I was trying to ignore. The sills have to be replaced now, not later.

The sills are the timbers that sit on top of the stones and support the walls.

Here you can see where moisture has rotted the sills from the outside. Last fall, I dug this out and found that 1-2 inches had rotted away. I didn't think that was too severe considering the sills for the main house are 10 inches thick. I assumed that the ell was built on at least 8x8 timbers and I that could repair the rot from the outside in nice weather.

Further discovery from the inside proved otherwise. The ell sills are simply 3x8 dimension lumber circa 1900. The same lumber used for the floor joists as seen here piled up in the living room.

Hopefully these big hemlock floor joists can be put to use elsewhere.

For the ell, the rotted lumber will be replaced with tripled-up 2x8 lumber, the two outside courses pressure treated.

That work will be done by professionals. They'll hold up the walls with jacks and beams while they knock out the old sills and then fit the new lumber in.

While I'm waiting for that to take place, I'm busy digging out the crawl space so there's more room under the floor once it's put back. There was virtually no room for accessing the old crawl space. If I can dig down a few inches, a courageous soul should be able to crawl around in there to do the inevitable repairs down the road.

© 2006 James Graham

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