Walked through an old mill in Vermont and noticed the floor joists were all rough-sawn and still solid after 130 years

I was poking around a restored grist mill in Waitsfield last weekend and the guide pointed out the original hand-cut floor joists. They're all white pine and still holding up the building with zero sag. Has anyone else seen old timber like that and wondered how the heck they figured out spans without engineering tables?

2 comments

2 Comments

theagibson23h ago

and honestly my own house has joists that squeak if i look at them wrong and theyre not even 50 years old yet so i gotta hand it to those old timers. they just eyeballed it and somehow it held up better than anything we build now. i tried building a simple shelf last month and it fell off the wall twice. these guys were out here raw dogging structural engineering with nothing but a level and a prayer.

patricia55823h ago

That thing about the shelf falling off the wall really got me thinking. Was that a drywall anchor situation where you just picked the wrong kind, or did you actually screw into a stud and it still gave out? Because I hear people all the time blaming modern tools when sometimes it is just a matter of hitting the right spot. And on the joist squeak thing, does your house have the old school diagonal subflooring or is it the newer plywood stuff? I have noticed the diagonal boards always seem to hold up better even if they are a hundred years old.