G’day Guys.

First forum post – first house renovation - so please be gentle…

Hoping I may be able to call on some of the experienced heads to provide some advice on my renovation project. I (with my wife) purchased an original condition ~1904, 2 bedroom weatherboard house 11km from the Perth CBD.

The property is not without faults, which were factored into our purchase price and one of the initial and major undertakings is making the timber floors level. The first room I am tackling is the old lounge room which drops over 2.5 inches in places with the old fire place being the high point in the room.

The floorboards are 5 ¼ inch jarrah boards in good condition and I have lifted them all without damage (virtually) so they can be re-laid when my sub-floor works are complete. The stumps and joists are also jarrah and appear to be in good condition.

Having had a look at the subfloor it is apparent that the joists are somewhat bowed and also it looks like the house settled in certain areas causing the floor to drop. Additional to all this, the ceiling was lowered in the 70’s and this is still level throughout the house which to me suggests the house has not “sunk” any more in the last 30-40 years.

I have tossed up a number of options for making the floor level and my main priorities are:

1)minimizing costs
2)minimizing the amount of future jobs created because of my works

Options that I have thought of and would be keen to get advice on include:

1)Restumping – not comfortable doing this myself and the contractor I had looked at it (from above the floor) prior to purchase gave a very loose estimate of 8 - 20k as it is “very severe and it doesn’t look like we can get underneath to do the work”. Also I am concerned that any jacking may cause cracking to walls and ceiling causing another job that I am unfamiliar with.
2)Angled timbers on top of the joists: Surprisingly when I lifted the floorboards the previous owner had attempted this in a section of the house. Simply cutting and angle piece of timer to match the drop of the joist – fixing this to the top of the joist and fixing the floorboards back down. For the whole house I think it would be very time consuming to try and get the angles right – also allot of planing to get things level.
3)Fixing some cheap timber panels to the joists and packing these to be level – then fixing the floorboards to the under floor. Problem I see with this method is that it will raise the whole floor and whilst I have decent height ceilings I will need to change all the door frames to fit standard doors into them.
4)Cutting a heap of small square timber packers of different thicknesses and putting these at different points along the top of each joist – problem with this method would potentially be noisy floorboards as there would probably be some movement on the nails as the packers would not run the full length of joist.
5)Fixing timbers to the side of the existing joist - i.e. installing new parallel joists and fixing the floorboards to these new joist – I liked this idea but am a little concerned that structurally the tacked on joist won’t have the same weight bearing value as the original joists so…
6)What I am thinking of is a combination of the sister joists in point (5) to make the floors level and fix the floorboards to; combined with point (4) the packers to take the some of the weight bear

Granted I still need to look at the costs of timbers to do the sister joists and but from a practical sense I am comfortable that I can do this work. Hopefully I wont have to use jarrah sister joists and can get away with a cheaper timber.

Keen to get peoples thoughts on my ideas or any other suggestions as I am very new to all this. I have (attempted to attach a couple of photos of my floor for what it is worth.

P.S. Whilst this is my first post, I promise it will be my longest.

 Thanks in advance - Craig




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