Things have escallated

 Oh the joys of working on a 100+ year old house.

For my next magical trick I decided I ought to jack up the enclosed porch, it had a case of the sags...

It's hard to tell from the picture but it sags to the front and to the center. The sag had then caused the step under the door to tip in which let water in and rotted the step out.

I started jacking under the left side, the corner in the front of the picture. That went pretty well, I've done work like this before and we have the right equipment for the job.

This is the "small" jack, it's a 4 ton unit, handy for these kind of jobs because it's short. We've also got a 6 ton that is a little beefier and a massive 12 ton for big jobs.

It's important to put a piece of scrap lumber between the jack and what you're jacking to prevent these kind of problems. However this was just a symptom of a larger issue.

That south end of the porch was just rotted away to nothing. The beam was a 6"x6"...

The last couple feet of the beam were still good so I opted to keep it. I went underneath and added a 4 foot section of 2"x8" and then put 174" of 2x8 to replace what we had removed.

With 6x6 beams in short supply I opted to use 4x 2x8s to make up the thickness. They match up nicely to the beam that remains while being a little bit taller.

The porch sits on these pipes. I think the screw part was an attempt to make the height adjustable but years of sitting outside have seized the threads. We ended up cutting off the part sticking above the pipe.

I cut these plates to go between the pipes and the wood to keep the pipes from pushing up into the wood. They're 4" wide and 7.5" long to distribute the load. I'm not sure of the thickness, probably 1/8", less than 1/4" certainly. For now they're just held in place by gravity but I probably should tack weld them to the pipes, they're kind of annoying to handle while jacking up the house.

The trim boards came apart when I removed them so I made new ones, they're just 1x6. The new step is 2x8 left over from the beam replacement. It fits perfectly for height. I had to cut away more on the right than the left to get rid of some rot. In retrospect I should have made it go all the way under the trim boards. I may revisit this again later, I was fighting rain and just wanted to get the job done. You can see we'll need to replace some flooring at some point in the future.

We had just a little paint left over after painting the house so I slapped it into the new work to protect it for the winter.

Also on the list for this trip but not photographed were a new light in the kitchen. The thing that was there hung on a chain right at head level so it had to go. I also finally replaced the door handle on the screen door. The inside handle was broken which made getting out a tricky proposition. Finally I put in a couple screws where the screen door was broken. The previous occupant had "fixed" it with tape. Maybe in October I'll take it apart and glue it for a better repair.