Kitchen Joists Replacement

This page shows the demolition of the old kitchen, and hopefully someday, shots of the finished product. Currently, the images depict the aftermath of cutting out the old wood floor and most of the joists. The final image shows the first few joists inserted into their final resting place.

The small images are about 3KB, the large blow-ups are 20-60KB; both are JPEG format.

Looking east, there's a small window in the basement, and you can also see the window from the old, non-existent bathroom on the main floor above. If you lighten this image, you can see a mess of joist stub-ends: we just hacked out the middles because we had to be careful of water and gas pipes on this side of the basement.

To the north, you can see our wonderful "temporary kitchen" (going on three years now)-: in the basement; every kitchen needs a ladder and blowtorch (Julia Child says the only way to brown French onion soup is with a propane torch, and we've got one). Above it is the edge of the dining room floor, where we hacked out the rotted wood kitchen floor, and the five layers of vinyl tile. One of the dining room walls has a large painting a friend did.
On the South are the two remaining joists, doubled up to support the additional load of the ex-stairwell to the extreme right. On the ground floor is the doorway leading out to the basement patio, and above it, the door leading out to the ex-kitchen porch. To the left is the outside of a tub-surround for our (again) temporary bathroom. No, that's not fine wood grain on the joist: it's extreme water damage.
This horror-show a little further to the West is a close-up of the doubled-joist intersection. The joist stub-ends were left after removing the middle of the joists. I had to come back and carefully cut out the holes to pull out all the electrical and phone cables. It's a hellish mess. Note the nifty telco block for all my phone lines in the bottom center. The blue hose-like thing is really just a conduit holding the phone and ethernet cables going upstairs: capacity for 12 phone lines :-)
We pre-drilled holes for electric cables, telephone, ethernet, and cable, and "dropped" new joists into the existing slots. We only had six, which is OK because we have to chunk-out bricks to create slots where there were none before -- in the old stairwell which is now gone.

Chris Shenton

Last modified: Thu Jun 6 18:32:00 1996

	Looking east, there's a small window in the basement, and you can also see the window from the old, non-existent bathroom on the main floor above. If you lighten this image, you can see a mess of joist stub-ends: we just hacked out the middles because we had to be careful of water and gas pipes on this side of the basement.
	To the north, you can see our wonderful "temporary kitchen" (going on three years now)-: in the basement; every kitchen needs a ladder and blowtorch (Julia Child says the only way to brown French onion soup is with a propane torch, and we've got one). Above it is the edge of the dining room floor, where we hacked out the rotted wood kitchen floor, and the five layers of vinyl tile. One of the dining room walls has a large painting a friend did.
	On the South are the two remaining joists, doubled up to support the additional load of the ex-stairwell to the extreme right. On the ground floor is the doorway leading out to the basement patio, and above it, the door leading out to the ex-kitchen porch. To the left is the outside of a tub-surround for our (again) temporary bathroom. No, that's not fine wood grain on the joist: it's extreme water damage.
	This horror-show a little further to the West is a close-up of the doubled-joist intersection. The joist stub-ends were left after removing the middle of the joists. I had to come back and carefully cut out the holes to pull out all the electrical and phone cables. It's a hellish mess. Note the nifty telco block for all my phone lines in the bottom center. The blue hose-like thing is really just a conduit holding the phone and ethernet cables going upstairs: capacity for 12 phone lines :-)
	We pre-drilled holes for electric cables, telephone, ethernet, and cable, and "dropped" new joists into the existing slots. We only had six, which is OK because we have to chunk-out bricks to create slots where there were none before -- in the old stairwell which is now gone.