DIY Landlord: How to Jack Up Your House by Yourself and Replaced Rotted Sill Plate

Well, I don't know what I'm going to get myself into, but I'm sure it won't be fun because we've got some rot here, what's going on, and I see part of the problem right there, don't I? I didn't set the flash high enough like we did years ago, so I'm going to rip this whole thing apart and see if we can't fix this mess right. I'm getting into the band board, a fixed

plate

took it out, but I found the problem, the problem is that you left a big crack in the porch, evidently, when they built this porch years ago, they didn't put enough gravel under it, whatever be the reason it's cracked and settled in the middle so all the water when it rains just directs it back here and carries it back to the

house

so probably the only solution is to build a shed on the porch back to cover it, make a covered porch with it and that will keep the water out, but I have to break it down.

All this and fix it first so yeah everything will be fine so you can see it just keeps getting worse and worse as I look at this and the boards the rotten sealing

plate

are all rotten so next thing I have than get the window

sill

. plate, but at the same time I had to support the floor so I could crawl under the

house

, get a big four by four post, some concrete blocks, a couple of

jack

s, I would lift it all up with a

jack

, but I thought I wanted a easiest way to do it. I don't want to deal with crawling out of the house because the crawl space is so far down so I thought I had my little porta power and this is what I did.

I have my little one. I'll show you. Look at the small jaw and then. I put a two on before and put a small wedge underneath to lift it up. I have to do it. Yes, I can go out. I guess I need to take out some nails here, but then this will be cut off and I'll leave it alone. I pulled it out, it had a nail holding me in, so now I pulled it out. Now you can see the floor is still supported, but when I get my new seal plate, I can just slide it in, slide it down here and take my Fly back down and take out the shims and drop the floor down so I can accomplish everything. this from above and I'll have to crawl underneath.

I don't like bugs anyway, okay, so here's my second one. I have it up, I have my shim under it and I cut it on the inside, it comes out very easy, so I'll just work on doing all that and get a new seal plate and it won't be so bad after all, helping. Yo, we're doing the cleaning, it's starting to get dark so you can see how far we've come so far, everything's fixed and we just have to clean up, get ready to be able to measure, see how much wood I need to get. for a new flight of steel, a new flashing and put it back together in a day or two.

Good morning, Marty. I'm wondering if you can give me some advice. I think I'm on the right track, but I know you're the pro at this. stuff, uh, let me show you my situation, what happened here, it's on a rental property and the porch is cracked and settling, it doesn't have any covering, but I'm fixing to get it removed. I'm going to support it to help keep the The water went, so where it cracked and settled, you see what it's done, the water runs right under the house and what it did was it

rotted

the sealing plate and , uh, the band board, I think it's called, so this is my plan that I have.

I have, I'm going to put a new one in, so I put it up where I have room here, so put me in a new treaty two before and I have a new bait two or two that I'll put in here, you know? roll the flashing in front of it like this and then after that, I'll go behind it with this self-adhesive flashing, uh, I plan on, you know, sticking it here to the concrete roll and on top of this as well. It's all that sticky stuff here and up here, uh, but still, yeah, high, so I think I'm doing the right thing, I'm not 100 sure, but I like

your

opinion, you see what makes the concrete dirty is the way it It settles, look how. it's up there, it's higher before it's much down here, it's just running water back to it, but like I said, I'm going to build a tilt mill and that should take care of this and I may even have to give myself a punch. hole, give me a drain to maybe let some water run into the rock.

I guess I didn't put in enough rock anyway. That's my situation. What do you advise me? Thank you, sir, see you. Well, it's the next day and I'll add a couple more supports. there are books on their side here there is a little soft spot here on the floor so I wanted to make it stronger so you see I already have one in place. I'll show you this little tip when you have a tough spot because I'm trying to do it. This to avoid the crown under the house, which is working pretty well, but there is a trick because when you put this board in, it will go like this, but as you tighten it, you want the board to be forced up. floor nice and tight, so by pre-drilling the holes you can accomplish this much easier, that way when that screw goes through, it's already pre-drilled, it will bite into the floor joist and then pull up nice and tight, so I pre-drilled the four holes, I have them pre-angled and I'll reach, you know, one hand and my impact and I'll lock it into place, so I'll do it next, I'll do it and I'll do it.

Get ready for the steel plate to be installed, you will see that it is in place and another key thing is to cut it to the correct length so that it fits snugly, so that the screws are not even in place, but it fits perfectly . to hold it up, hold it up so then I'm going to take them out and put those screws in there and that's going to give a little bit of extra support to the floor as you can see I put the

sill

plate on pretty good, I did a dry. Run, I don't have flashing underneath yet, I want to make sure it went in.

I have a tight spot on the top floor joist. I need to jack it up a little bit, another shim under it because it's a little tighter to make room for the flashing, so I'm going to pull it out again, put the flashing under it and see if we can finish it. Oh, here's another tip, but before I put the flashing on, I took my grinder and put the entire surface of the concrete here, so everything is nice and smooth, so we don't have any hot spots or anything like that, so get ready to put the flashing under there and put the sill plate on, okay, you'll see the band board is in place, it's a little tricky to do.

I did it on my own, but I have this triple poi here and I got some wedges and shimmed it to lift it up and down, so I bounced around a little bit and took a few hits with a hammer, I did that and uh comfortably it lifted me up a little bit. They picked up the tools from all over the house and tuned them up a bit and lowered the jacks or lowered the floor joists which they lowered to level everything again. I almost have it ready. Well, I'm under the house. I'll show you what I do.

I'm going to lift this up, okay, it came up, but don't take too long to get it out and then release the jack, turn on the light, here we go, so now it's resting on the new sill plate, so I'll go this way. I have several more to do that too and I can get out of here away from all these bugs. Well, I want to show an example of why I do what I do. I've pre-drilled these holes, so I'm going to take this. strip board and I'm pulling it towards the floor joist very tight, hopefully it will sink in there and pull the board in if not pre-drilled, say for example we had a situation like this, imagine this is the board band is a floor joist and you just run that screw in there, well the screws go right in, it goes through and goes in, it gets a good bite, you know, into the floor joist, but because the screw also has a good bite here, it just tightens. and it stops because these threads still fight very well on this outer piece of wood, but now if you pre-drill it, these pieces I guess are called flutes, they don't dig in when you bite into this piece, the head is like this when you put it on.

Up there this head will sink into the wood and tighten it like this so you know you have a very tight connection otherwise you'll think it's tight and you still have a gap that's my advice well all the screws are in everything what is done. I'm just going to bend the flashing and nail it into place to see what it looks like and we'll move on to the next step to see how far we'll go before we start well, well I think I'll do it in this video, here's it. I'm almost done, I just talked to my concrete guy, we're going to bust this whole thing out, get rid of it and pour another patio for the deck, so I'll leave this open in case we need to add anything. additional flashing or anything, but anyway, if you have a situation like this, with a few simple tools, you can sweat a little, you can do it

your

self, no problem, no problems, it's very easy, well, you have a great day and thanks for watching, bye.

Look, we're doing a porch demo, make room for a new one here, let's make room for a new porch demo in demo time, demo time, huh, well we're about to get it, I've got sweet pea, packing up rock, look at it, go see. her, yeah, yeah, superwoman right there, amazing superwoman, almost finished this project, get us a new concrete board, awesome last page, what a great job, what a great job, okay, it's all cleaned up, ready to form and pour concrete, new deck with rebar, something that will last this time, not fall apart.