HawthorneVillager.com

So we had an opportunity to see an already-built version of our home a little while ago. I noticed in the basement that portions of the first floor was being held up in a really odd manner. Is this normal / legal / up to code??

My memory is a bit fuzzy now, so the order might have been floor, i-beam, stack of wood, support beam, floor - but in any case, I don't think that stack of wood should be there??

I don't know anything about home construction, but your right ... that doesn't look right  ... from what I've heard and read on this forum you might want to find out if this home you looked at was one of Mattamys 'Spirit' homes that was built a few years ago or call Mattamys engineering department and ask them.

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xNAD!NEx

Was it a 34' plan 4? They seem to all have that design from what I've seen.

Edit: wait do you mean it's just a stack of wood squares? No cross beam? If so, that does seem strange.

Not 100% sure if it is or not correct but from our experience, if there is so much wood between I beam & the joists, it will definitely dry out/shrink & that part of the sub-floor will sag!

Usually the joist is supposed to be sitting on the I beam or if there is any wood beams, etc. they are not lying flat, they are vertical. If there is any need for shims, steel shims are used not wood.

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This was in a plan 13, just like ours. I believe the house we saw was less than a year old though.

Even more suspiciously, we went into a brand new 30' unit over the weekend and found no support beams or poles whatsoever!

What I did see, was towards the middle of the house in the basement, they used something like this:



Imagine looking straight up at this. It was a stack of wood, each plank being about 2 inches thick by maybe a foot wide, all bolted together with some heavy gauged bolts.

This is considered a beam & it's normal & your joists are sitting on that.

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^^^ That just seems shoddy to me... If we have sump pumps, we might have water or at least moisture management issues... Water + wood = collapsed house?

Except for a few steel posts & few I beams, everything else is made out of wood

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Maybe they were using that too, push the floor boards in the room above to flatten them out? I'm just guessing cause in our kitchen there was a spot I walked on and it made a noticeable creek and the PDI a inspector said he knew about that issue and had to fix it. This was after the kitchen was completely finished with tiles, so maybe that was done to correct the issue without having to strip the floors? Just a guess.

So I had a chance to take a look at another built basement and found a more accurate represenation of what I was trying to say:

It's the main support beam...totally normal. Mine looks the exact same (triple 2x6 wood). Our last house had a steel support beam (6 inch), same function. Over the long term, I would rather the steel beam, but meh, the 2 teleposts are so close together I doubt that sagging will ever be an issue.

I definitely would've preferred a steel beam - this is the first i've ever seen it being done like this. To top it off, it looks like they use one piece of good wood (pressure treated, etc) in the middle then surround/reinforce it with two poorer quality planks.

Builder cost cutting sucks I'm not sure if all regular Mattamy homes get a steel beam, but the Spirit homes definitely do not. I was in a Heathwood before the Mattamy, and the initial higher cost resulted in better construction and materials.

you'll be buried in the ground for 100 years before that beam gets replaced, along with the rest of the house.