A lid on the Basement !

With great relief the weather finally gave up on trying to wash away the Island and tried to bake it to death instead . I built all the internal stud-work to account for irregularities in the concrete floor with the use of a tight string line off the wall plates cutting each piece individually . These were placed on chalk lines meticulously measured on the floor and the wall plates . they were connected together with a second top plate overlapping the joints by at least two feet where possible .
Next the position of all the beams were marked on both wall plates by measurement ai 16" centres to give 3 pieces in every 4' as the flooring comes in 8' sheets . Underneath where the upper walls were to be either one or two glu e micro laminate beams were fitted to give them support .
The TJI beams , which are a sort of engineered I beam with laminate on top and bottom and a web of osb between , were put in position 1 1/2 " in from the wall plate to make room for the " rim joists ". These TJI's come in at about $1.75 a foot compared to the micro laminate at $ 6.00 per foot .

Darrell had to go to another job after cutting the tji's to length . Unfortunately there was some error and Dave and me placed them in position averaging out the long and the short ones . and pinning them loosely down . When we then fitted the rim joists by toe nailing them we had to

adjust the lengths of the tji's again to ensure the correct dimensions of the building .

We used joist hangers and micro -laminate beams around the stair well and acr

oss the fireplace . I used an excellent air palm nailer to do the final nailing .

With all the marking out and measuring and re-adjusting the job had gone not as quickly as I would have liked but we took a break and sourced some nails for the flooring before putting in a hard 2 hour session in the evening to fix the floor . This was a special type of OSB with a tongue on one long edge and a groove on the other . Firstly a chalk line was made across the joists one width in on the long edge . the tops of the joists were glued and the 8' x 4' sheets were placed in rows on the line being nailed in position as we went . The second row was started to with a shorter piece to space out the joins and firmly seated with a sledge hammer and a block of wood

The neighbour Bob came out with three cans of beer as the sun came down and we used up all the sheets we had . We w

ere three short ! It had been a long day !

OSB or osb = Oriented strand board
More pictures here !

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