Breakfast room floor

I finally tackled the breakfast room floor. It's been bugging me ever since I ripped out the old kitchen. The floor was in awful shape as you can see here:


The black stuff is the remnants of old linoleum tile glue. If that were the only problem with the floor I would have bit the bullet and scrapped the stuff off. Unfortunately the floor is also badly slanted and heavily rotted. 60 years as a kitchen were hard on this room.

In one corner of the room there was a patch that was very rotted. This corner held an old washing machine for at least the last 30 years. the drain for it must have overflowed often.


Because our driveway goes around to the back of the house this is our main entrance and the first room everyone sees when they come over. There's nothing worse than making all kinds of progress on the house and when you bring people over to show them the very first thing they see is this room... So the floor had to go.



Wonderful, as is usually my luck, many of the joists are rotted.


All 4 of these joists are bad and have to be replaced.



When I went to take them out most simply crumbled in my hands like Styrofoam.


A prime example of why I hate notch-cut joists. This is an otherwise perfect joist without any rot.



This entire house seems to be built from salvaged wood, This mortise still has the original dowel in it. There is other evidence of salvaged wood throughout the house, even in the original portion. The back sill in the original portion of the house has mortise cuts in it as well. From the look of it, it was once vertical and held the floor and ceiling sills on a 2 story house(the mortise cuts are very large on it). Most of the beams with mortise cuts in them appear to be hand hewn as well. I'm wondering if this house was built on the location of an older one, it's entirely possible as Griffin was formed in 1840 and there was an even earlier town here before that called Pleasant Grove.

Back to the floor... I removed all the bad joists...


...and installed new pressure-treated 2x10's with metal joist hangers.


We were having company over that night so I went ahead and hurriedly laid the subfloor without shimming it.


You cant tell from this picture but the floor slopes away and to the right by almost 1 1/2".

The next day I made the shims.


I laid them out on top of the subfloor for the picture to give a good idea of how much the floor slopes.

I pulled up the subfloor and screwed in the shims.


I then laid the subfloor back down.


Before I lay the flooring down I'm going to scrape/sand and prime the walls and ceiling. I'm not looking forward to that as most of the walls and all of the ceiling is beadboard. Hopefully the walls and floor will be done by this weekend... yeah right!