I'm helping a builder friend to build a new back wall of my house.

A bit of background.

When my house was built in 1922, it was originally double backed so to speak. Facing the back of the house, the bath room is at the far right, at the far left was a sleepout, & the section between them was open but under roof. The back corner posts for the old sleepout are 4" x 4" timbers. The back door was originally the door leading into the kitchen, & they stepped down out of the kitchen then up into the bath room. No one seems to remember if there was a floor here or not, so we'll presume there wasn't, or there was & it rotted away & was discarded. With information gathered from neighbours, a wall was built about 50 years ago to enclose this section & included a new back door.

Dodgy Bros work number 1: When this new wall was built, they didn't connect it to the other wall, but left a gap of about 50mm & covered this gap on the outside with a vertical bit of board between the two sets of windows. Also, the new back doorway they created didn't have a door frame or jamb. All it was, was a stud at the end of this new wall which they put the lock plate into & a stud at the other side which they screwed the door hinges into. This stud was not connected to the corner stud of the bath room either, with about a 25mm gap between the two.

Now, at some point in time in the last 7 years, give or take a year or two, a new floor was laid down in this section.

Dodgy Bros work number 2: I think the photos say a lot more than I could ever describe easily. Tops of stumps at ground level so bearers are laying on the dirt, 2 rows of joists instead of one, plus wedges, to get the height (the plain untreated joists run in the same direction as the joists under the floor in the old sleepout). Heaven knows what the bloke was thinking when he built this floor frame.

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