I have a little more to share about a challenge we faced during one of our current renovations. Whether you are looking to buy a home or you are renovating an older home yourself, you are likely to run into something like this.

The Oddities of Prior Renovations

Many houses are renovated little by little over the years–an addition here, closing in a porch there, knocking out walls to combine rooms or building walls to divide them, another addition years later…often resulting in an odd, higgeldy-piggeldy layout. We ran into just such a challenge with this renovation, and it nearly had me pulling out what is left of my hair! Hopefully you can benefit from our experience.

The home had an original carport that had been enclosed many years ago. Unfortunately, when they built the floor at that time, they dropped it lower than the rest of the house’s floor level.

We wanted to tackle that challenge in order to provide our new buyers with the convenience and safety of an even floor throughout the first level. When we opened up the floor, the piers supporting the floor joists were very substantial–the floor joists themselves, however, were not, and we had to rip everything out to make way for the new joists.

We decided to use a TJI floor joist system to raise the floor level and span the room most efficiently. That process was simple enough, especially with the TJI manufacturer assisting with the engineering.

But wait a minute–you’d better talk to the building inspectors and an engineer first and get real architectural plans made up to avoid having to jump through too many hoops. We had to jump through some, but hey, we learned a lot about the new codes and have a ton of experience with drawings and calculations about live loads. Took a little time but it really turned out right.

When you start planning major changes on a property that you know make sense, be prepared to go through a couple of reviews of the design, and review those plans in detail. Again, it is always cheaper to do it right the first time, even if you have to take a little extra time. Or as my good buddy always says: “plan the work and work the plan.”