What would you do with this?

[EddyP]

So we're doing quite a bit of work to a 16th Century farmhouse, part of this is to redo the kitchen, I've had the floor boards up in the bedroom above today to start sorting out the wiring and have found some rather worrying looking joists.

My main concern was with this one, as the original electrician decided to drill the bottom of the 4" joist, then when the house was rewired the next electrician decided it would be a good idea to notch the joist directly above the holes!!
This joist is already not the best as it has a fair bit of wood worm, is a little soft on the edges but hard towards the middle.

I then lifted a few more boards to get to some disused cables and found that there was a joist running in the opposite direction, about a metre from the wall, one end of this joist sits on the joist our electrician friend notched, the other end I haven't found yet.
There are then 3 maybe 4 joists that sit between the wall and this joist, so infact the dodgy joist is holding up half the floor!

They've been nicely jointed too, they basically sit on a bit of batten

I then decided to expose more of the dodgy joist so that I could look at putting a new joist alongside and bolts them together, and found this is what the end looks like

So my current thoughts are to put a bit of 4x4 in alongside the dodgy beam, use some joist hangers each end that are large enough to go under both dodgy joist and new joist and then attach them to the main beam one end and the wall the other end.
Then use either some big fat screws or some coach bolts along the length to tie the two together.

And then where the joists run which have a joist running through the middle of them I could put some steel plate on the top of the two joist parts are the one running perpendicular to tie them all together and give it a bit more strength.

Any other ideas?

This is a duplicate thread from the flooring forum but I know it's a lot quieter in there and could really do with the advice quite soon as the plasterer is coming on Thursday.

Thanks

Ed.

 

[bernardgreen]

This looks like a floor that was not part of the original build but added later to create rooms upstairs. Previously the joist were probably only holding up the ceiling and were never intended to carry the weight of a floor.

Resting joists on battens nailed to the sides of beams is acceptable. The house we built used that method but the battens were 2 by 2.

That joist needs to be replaced ( in my opinion ) Clamping splints to it might be successful but if the surface of the joist is soft then it might crumble under pressure from the splint.

I had one like that and had to bite the bullet and fit a complete new joist from wall to beam along side the old one.

 

[ree]

Firstly: stop lifting and splintering the T&G boards - they are not 16C but about 100yrs old. The lost head nails i can see are more recent.

If your cottage (or even parts of it) is actually anywhere near 16C then its probably got a Grade 1 listing, and what you are doing could land you with a massive fine? You need permission to touch any part of a listed building. But you must have been informed of all this on purchase?

Its not clear to me how the pics relate to each other?

Second: get a joiner in to lift any more boards and to advise on how to proceed with the joisting - brief him or her that you want to keep the old material.
There seem to be issues of bearing supports esp. at the hump of plaster - is that the back of an eaves coving or a barrel shaped hallway?
Pics of the outside might help?

Remove all nails and screw back down.

Mark all boards and their positions and their orientations.

It might pay you to post in the Elec forum for views on the wiring - it looks very DIY?