Address mechanical and infrastructure issues while you have the chance!

As we are still in demolition mode with our basement renovation, it gives us the opportunity to address issues that we might not otherwise. For example, on our main floor, we have some serious floor sloping in one area. The main floor is right atop our basement. Now that our basement ceiling is fully removed and exposed, I thought that this would be the perfect time to investigate the cause of the slope, and possible remedies.

My gut feeling would be that our basement posts need to be raised, or we need additional support in the basement for the main floor, to remedy it. At first I went to Shannon from http://www.house-improvements.com. Shannon really knows his stuff, and is extremely helpful. I started a thread on Shannon's forum asking for his advice. Shannon suggested that I look into a few things, which I have, but at this point I'm just throwing darts in the dark. It would really be a tedious and trial-and-error research process.

Since I don't want to bombard Shannon's with all of this trial and error stuff (the guy definitely commits a lot of extracurricular time to his online presence and does contracting), I started to think that maybe a structural engineer would be the better way to go from here.

So I contacted K.H Davis Engineering Consultants in Toronto (aka Ken Davis Structural Engineering on homestars.com). I contracted them out to come to our house this Thursday to look at our main floor sloping issue. For $450 + HST, they come onsite, and research the issue. Within a week or two they then deliver you documents that detail the steps to remedy the issue. I'm hoping that this will be money well spent.

The other issue that I have the opportunity to address is our incredibly low airflow from our bedrooms ducts. We live in a split level home that was made in the 1960's. Split levels are well known for temperature variance between floors, but in our case, the issue is exacerbated because we hardly get any airflow coming out of our top floor bedroom ducts! In addition, it might be nice to move the basement ductwork around a bit, to gain more headroom where it matters more. More to come on that.