ducting and pipes

We decided on a hydronic air handler as a sort of combined heating and hot water system. Some of the ducting has already gone in. Also put in the plumbing. It'll be exciting to have water flowing (as opposed to trickling) and hot water in the bathroom sink.


Our system designer, George Nesbitt, likes to put the heating vents/registers up high on the wall, which we like - makes furniture placement easier, probably gets the air that comes out to flow around the room better.







Some of the old pipes

floor joists

****I'm using smaller pictures for this one, but (in case you haven't figured this out) if you click on any of the pictures, they blow up to full page size.


more pieces involved here than I would have thought, and definitely more than there used to be based on the looks of the existing structure.

these i-beams that they are using for the floor joists can apparently provide support across a 25 foot span without sagging.
Mudsills - what the framing will attach to.

So I got curious about the etymology of "mudsills" and learned that this building structure actually serves in the etymology for another meaning of the word. This was the first hit that came up from wikipedia. Twisted and disturbing, but probably not as surprising as I wish it were that someone would actually posit this as "sociological theory."

From Wikipedia:

"Mudsill theory is a sociological theory which proposes that there must be, and always has been, a lower class for the upper classes to rest upon. The inference being a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building.

The theory was first used by South Carolina Senator/Governor James Henry Hammond, a wealthy southern plantation owner, in a Senate speech on 4 March 1858 ^[1], to justify what he saw as the willingness of the lower classes and the hegemony of non-whites to perform menial work which enabled the higher classes to move civilization forward. With this in mind, any efforts for class or racial equality that ran counter to the theory, would inevitably run counter to civilization itself.

Many saw the argument as a weak justification for exploitation, and a flimsy example of creating your own science to reference as proof.^[2] An obvious flaw lies in that there are no indications as to which class or race rightfully belongs to the mudsill other than the pre-supposed regional groups that were already in place at the "bottom", causing a circular argument.

It was directly used to advocate slavery in the rhetoric of John C. Calhoun and other pre-Civil War Democrats, that were struggling to maintain their grip on the Southern economy. They saw the abolition of slavery as a threat to their powerful new Southern market that revolved almost entirely around the plantation system which was furthered by the use of primarily African slaves, but also utilized destitute whites."

Back to the floor joists.

These are the hangers, whose name actually indicates their function.

starting to hang the joists.

...and ready for the subfloor.