Straightening up

Yes, flat floors and walls have an undue monopoly in the world. But right angles can be useful.

Kevin did a great job squaring up the broken bones in this house.

We used to laugh a lot when giving tours of this house, particularly at the stair to the third floor. "Look, here, in the space of 8 stairs, the wall bows out 8 inches!" Some of our guests didn't find this as amusing as we did. Well, the game is thankfully over, and Kevin, our framer, has somehow managed to create straight lines again. Thank you, Kevin!

You can see the laminated lumber "belt" all the way around the house at the level of the third floor. Not only is it an incontrovertible sign of the walls falling in line, it will also distribute all of the weight from the various ins, outs and openings on the third floor so that none of it gets too concentrated on the old balloon framing downstairs. Also, each old floor joist got a new sibling. Neither one would hold the new weight of the third floor (it was built just to be empty attic space) but together, no sweat. Fewer excuses for curvilinearity in the future.

Meanwhile, the mason who made our brick foundations safer also cared enough to patch up the chipped corner of our porch. Evidently the enormous metal bollard was a reactive, not a proactive, measure.

In the last picture, you can see a kind of squaring that only architects and engineers, in close concert, could devise. To keep the roof from pushing out on the walls (which, due to insufficient reinforcement, created that 8" wiggle in the first place) we need a ridge beam carrying half the weight at the top of the house. Of course, the middle of the roof is not directly over the middle wall of the house where all the posts are. So instead of building the beam at the center, it's down and over just a bit, carrying all the load through tiny cross-rafters at each bay. Still, we think it's better than having to hurdle cables every 16" in the hallway.