Sagging floors -Pt. 1

When we moved to our farm, there was an outbuilding here commonly known as an equipment shed.  News to this city girl - I'd never heard of such a thing.  Our building consisted of 4 "bays" where you can park farm equipment under cover. On one end of the building was a bay with a huge door on hinges that could be swung shut. It was held in place by a cinderblock!  In the middle were two open bays and on the other end of the building was a room with a huge hanging sliding door.

It was decided that this would be one of our projects this year - to get this building in tip-top shape!  Fixed, cleaned, painted and organized is our goal.

Here's a picture of the building before.  Some of the smaller problems that we found...hinges on the swinging door at the far end needed to be replaced.  We also needed a way to lock that door shut - the cinderblock thing wasn't working for us. The sliding door towards this end of the picture was pulling away from the building - the support board had been poorly hung and we knew it would soon be on the ground. However, our biggest problem was in the room on the left with the sliding door. The floor in this room was much like a fun-house floor...slanted and crazy - all balls rolled to the middle on one side. It's a great room - lots of storage and fairly weather tight but awfully hard to walk around in. 

I was always under the impression that this was a huge and expensive job.  However, some months ago, one of the men in our church explained to my boys how easy and inexpensive this would be to fix.  There'd be plenty of hard work involved but not much money - just time. 

The boys were told that they needed to empty that side of the room, pull up the floor, and assess the situation.  It was carefully explained to them how to do this safely - which made me a happy mama.  I'm thankful that there are godly men in our church body who are there to guide them through these projects around our farm.  I can rest easy in the counsel and advice my boys receive from these wonderful men.

Here they have emptied that side of the room and are just beginning to pull up the floor boards.

Beginning to get an understanding of what went wrong....

At this point the boys have figured out that the floor is no longer attached to the wall. Apparently the crossbeams under the floor were attached to a board that was nailed to the wall. The board that held the floor to the wall was rotten in several places, probably because of age. When that rotten board fell apart, the wall separated from the floor which caused the floor to begin to sink.  

Years of neglect only caused it to sink further and further rendering that side of the room unusable.  Reminds me of what my Grandma used to say..."a stitch in time, saves nine"!

Once the boys assessed the problem, they were ready to seek counsel once again...

Stay tuned for the fix!

Blessings,