Last week we went out to my step dad’s house to help repair his garage. It was in need of repair because it was basically only half supported. Yup, that’s always a good thing. His house sits on a hillside and the garage sits over a really picturesque creek

The creek is picturesque, but it’s also a little problematic. Whenever there are strong storms there is so much water rushing down the hill that it actually forces those boards to pop up (and sometimes go into the street). This past winter however it was even worse: there were so many strong rainstorms back to back that the creek was so strong and carried so much debris down the hill that it knocked many supports off their piers

Yes, that’s correct, there is nothing between that concrete pier and the floor joist. Not a good thing. Of the 13 supports that hold up the garage 6 were either knocked off their pier or the support from concrete to joist got washed away.

This happened several months ago and CBH hasn’t been parking in the garage (because duh, the car would probably fall into the creek), but we’ve been waiting until the creek went down to a trickle and we had some free time to come help rescue the garage. So that time was finally last week.

CBH had already pulled up some of the floor boards so we had easy access to underneath

We started in the center and worked our way to the outside. Starting in the center was a good idea because it had fallen so low. See this center support in between the two garage doors?

That’s supposed to be flush with the header

For this first post Chris and CBH set up two jacks to jack up the garage

After things were safely set up I went back up to the main level of the garage to watch for when the post hit the header so they could stop jacking up the structure. They moved very slowly and I yelled out how many fractions of an inch they were away until we had success

Once we knew the garage had been jacked up the correct amount in that area we worked on installing supports from pier to joist

After the first one was done we moved down the line

We set up a plumb bob to see just how much out of plumb the rushing water had knocked this support out of place

And once they knocked it back into place they used some wedges to keep it secure (all the hardware will come later)

Then again it was moving down the line to the next support. Nothing between pier and joist…

Now supported

Things actually went really smoothly. We didn’t anticipate the work being terribly difficult, but we thought it would be much more time consuming. This was one of those projects that could have gone really well or terribly wrong, and we got lucky that it went really well. Chris and CBH just moved from post to post measuring, jacking, correcting

We originally thought we only had to fix 6 supports, but we noticed another problematic one so we ended up fixing or replacing 7 of the 13 garage supports. The jacking and support correction took us only about 2 hours. We were totally surprised by that. I wasn’t too much help during this project, which is getting increasingly disappointing because I don’t have fun not helping. But the terrain was really rocky and incredibly uneven under the garage so CBH and Chris wanted to make sure my pregnant self was safe and didn’t fall. Mostly I hopped back and forth between under the garage and inside the garage to hand them tools. At least I was kinda helpful 🙂

Once all the support work was done it was time to finish things off. CBH took the reciprocating saw and sawed off the edges of the wedges that were sticking out

And then it was time to really attach all of our new supports. We used 16 penny nails to nail the new supports to the joists above them and to the wedges that were below them

I even got in on some of the action

We used straps to secure these two posts together

Then we used an assortment of Simpson ties to really make sure our new supports were secured well to the garage structure

I got to play again

And if you follow us on Facebook on Monday you would have seen the really flattering photo Chris took of me. Or actually my bulging belly

Cashew cannot be contained 🙂

Straps were also used in a few cases to run from garage structure, down through the support and to the concrete pier

Around this time I was walking around taking pictures and I slipped on a rock. It could have gone really bad, but luckily I have very good balance (even while nearly 33 weeks pregnant) and I just stumbled several steps forward, stepped in a bunch of water and caught myself before falling. Chris was not pleased and put me on timeout and I wasn’t allowed to play under the garage anymore with him and CBH. Damnit. But luckily they were just about done 🙂

I think with all the work that we did to correct the support system and adding all the hardware did A LOT to strengthen the structure of the garage. It’s certainly not perfect, but it is hugely improved. For years while walking around in the garage there was a little bounce to it, but now it doesn’t move an inch. Project competed. And another item checked off our 2013 house goal list, yay!