Sister Sister

Years ago we had the Terminex folks treat our house for a termite problem. We're pretty sure the termites are all gone now, but they made Swiss Cheese out of one of the joists under the hallway, so I installed a parallel joist (a process called sistering) and tied it into the damaged one with a bunch of screws. The other three joists under the hallway appear to be undamaged, but I'm installing sister boards for them as well, to make a solid foundation for the tile that we will install next week.

One end of the sister board just would not come completely vertical, no matter how much hammering I applied. This problem was quickly resolved with the application of our trusty 5-ton hydraulic jack, as pictured below.



















Since the 16" joist spacing is tight, I pre-drilled and started screws in the second sister board before installation.  The new boards were perfectly flat when purchased a few days ago, but had warped a bit while sitting in the basement and garage.  A C-clamp made short work of correcting the warp until the screws could be fully installed.

Last night, I drilled holes in our wall cabinet doors and installed the handles.  This morning, Sharron helped me re-install the doors on the cabinets.  We still have to make the final adjustment to get all the doors at the same level, but they are pretty close now.

We unpacked the base cabinets and set them in place to check the alignment and to get an idea of how much shimming we will need to do to get the front panels and top frames in perfect alignment.  The whole lineup also has to present a perfectly flat and level surface for the granite that will be installed next month.

We ran into one little problem when we had all the cabinets temporarily positioned.  We all agreed that we'd better eliminate the duplex outlet next to the end cabinet, so I removed the outlet and spliced the wires with some wire nuts, while Sharron cut out a piece of drywall from the dining room/kitchen wall that we will soon be removing. 

 

After some custom shaving, the drywall plug got a generous supply of spackling and was placed over the outlet box.  While I had the spackling open, I covered the screw holes below the wall cabinets where the ledger board had been.  I like this color-coded spackling that we got at Home Depot - pink when wet, and white when dry and ready for sanding.  Very handy!

 

 Tomorrow, I will sand and re-spackle the patch, which should be ready for touch-up paint later in the day.  Then we can start playing with shims and getting the base cabinets screwed to the wall studs.