Meanwhile in the basement

Jeremy, Joe and Aaron in the midst of moving the I-beam down into the basement

Jeremy

This is the interior of the steel supply house. The large orange thing over the racks is a crane that moves on rails to move massive pieces of steel for cutting

We take a brief moment here away from all the finish work upstairs to address a project happening in the basement.

Its been apparent for a while that the first floor has a bit of spring to it. Not enough that would be a problem on any sort of practical level, but enough that you feel the footsteps of someone walking past as you are doing something; enough that I thought it worth reinforcing under the long span of floor joists running under the living/dining area. The solution is to place a beam under the middle point of the span to effectively halve the span of each joist.

I called up the local steel supply house and ordered up a steel I-beam that is 6" high by 6" wide by 23' long. This thing weighs 25lbs. per foot, coming to 575 pounds for our piece; the delivery consisted of unceremoniously flipping it off the edge of the truck bed onto the ground. In order to get it in the basement I had Aaron and Jeremy come over to help Joe and I manoeuvre it, which we did with the ever-amazing garden cart that acted as a set of wheels under the center of the beam as we rolled it to the back hatchway. From there we were able to sort of slide it down into the basement and then move it around on some 2" wooden dowels that Aaron brought over. All told the whole moving project went reasonably easily and safely. Joe borrowed a roll-able lift that acts pretty much like a hand cranked fork lift. We'll use this tomorrow to lift the beam into place and install support posts at both ends and in the middle.