Hello fellow engineers (I'm a computer engr), so I bought this house which is sort of like a smelly onion, the more I peel back, the more it sinks, literally, but also the more thousands of dollars it's costing me :(
Oh well, today's new dilemma is shoring up the flat ceiling joists. Nearly 1/4 of my house is flat roof (I know, believe me), anyways, I'm replacing the roof above it with a taper system, and have all of the ceiling and insulation removed below it, so I have full access below.
The width is around 65' and the span is 13', there are currently 2x6 16" OC making the span, which from my feeble attempts of figuring things out is right at the maximum. The joists are nearly all sagging to some degree, the worst are up to 1.5" sagging! The only load on the ceiling is a simple bitumen roof and that is all (in FL, no snow loads), roof will be replaced with a much lighter TPO system. I'm guessing the sag is from some water damage? The more water damaged joists are definitely sagging the most. Joists are 14' full length and resting on block walls 6" at each end. There is no room to use a 8" high joist.
My total guess of a solution is to buy 14' 2x6 yellow pine or maybe LVL, jack up each section to a little bit over level, and fully span and sister every other joist, it's going to be a lot of work for me, so I'd like to have some confidence in a solution before moving forward. Does anyone have any recommendations? Or should I just bite the bullet and get a structural engineer over to look at it?
Rasterman,
Consider this: You are installing a new sloped roof so it doesn't matter that the "attic" floor isn't even. You could just sister a 2X4 to each beam, notching for the cross braces, to level out the ceiling below. This will only subtract the sag from your interior height. Even less work would be to just install a dropped ceiling, dropped just enough to get the panels in and out, losing maybe about 3-4 inches of interior height.
Timelord
Thank you, yes I did consider that, but due to other restrictions the taper can only be 1/4" per foot, so the 1.5" sag would probably create a flat spot. I'd also rather correct the issue rather than lowering my ceiling height, ceiling height is already low at 94".
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