Sometimes the ends of your floor joist can suffer from a
variety of damage like termites and wood rot. Most of this damage will
be caused by moisture but in this case, someone had notched the ends of
the floor joist in a bad spot.
The bottoms and the ends of the floor joist or notched and just barely
sitting on the concrete footing and framing sill. This floor could have
been repaired once before and was not part of the original construction.
However, the damage is done, the floor is now weak and repairs need to
be made.
Notching the bottom of a 2 x 10 floor joist 2 inches will now make it a
2 x 8, structurally. If you made the same notch above, it wouldn't have
the same effect and could still be considered a 2 x 10 by a structural
engineer.
Notching the bottom of the floor joist can result in splitting the joist
if enough weight was applied to the floor.
In the picture above, plywood was applied to each side of the floor
joist and then through bolted with carriage bolts. This can provide
additional support and is a pretty good idea.
Home Repair Tip: Carpenters and framing contractors can be pretty
creative, when it comes to fixing or repairing broken or damaged framing
members. Here's the problem though, let's just say that this floor
repair failed, but it only failed because someone put a water bed in
this room. The additional weight caused the floor repair to fail and now
the entire floor system needs to be removed and repaired.
This is just a hypothetical situation. If you would have installed new
floor joist or additional floor joist, this hypothetical damage might
not have ever happened, but now it's going to cost a lot more to fix,
then it would have been to install a few additional floor joist.
The story I just made up, are things that I run into regularly in the
construction business. Repairing someone else's home repairs and dealing
with unhappy homeowners, who have now paid twice for the same repair.
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