Hi,

I just moved to a new house a month ago and am in the middle of my second project which is to replace the garage doors & openers and to redo part of the garage floor.  The house is located in center of town in Acton, MA.  It is a 4BR, 2.5BA colonial with a 2 car under garage built sometime around 1966. 

I have a garage door company lined up to install R-16 steel clad doors with Merantec openers (I’m impressed how quiet they are). My mason already ripped up 1/3 of the garage floor which had cracked and settled in various spots thereby causing the door to not close all the way (the gap is about 3″ on each side of the door).

Over the weekend, I was cutting away some of the garage door rails near the floor to ensure that they would not be in the way of the floor.  I noticed that there was some rot in the middle wall between the two garage doors.  I pulled the plaster away and saw that the sill was completely rotted away and 2-3 inches of the posts were also rotted.  Great.

My carpenter is going to come out Saturday morning to see what should be done.  I’m guessing is that he’ll rig up some sort of temporary support structure (bunch of 2×4 ganged together to support the top plate, garage header, and support beam before cutting away the sill and the bottom portion of the posts.  With the temporary support in place, my mason will be able to pour the floor.  Once the floor is in place, I’m guessing that he’ll put 3-4 2×6 PT boards together for a new sill plate and toe nail the posts to them and secure them to the newly poured floor.

My concern has to do with the footing and support wall. If you look at the picture (labelled no_sill_and_maybe_footer_2), you’ll see that there is a little blob of concrete in the middle and two bricks under each 4×4 post. Below the bricks, there is a “slab” about 18 inches wide that runs the length of the garage door wall.  I would have expected to see the sill resting on an 8″ wide wall that goes X inches into the ground to rest on the footing.  I’m surprised to see that this band of concrete is actually 18 inches (perhaps more) wide.  This made me wonder if there’s no footing that down the road, I will have the same problem.  I spoke to my mason on the phone to reschedule the pour and he says that this is typical the way they do garage floors. He said that once the wall is supported, he’ll work the floor to be underneath the wall so that my carpenter can attach the new sill plates to the floor.

Anyway, what are your thoughts?  Thanks for any and all advice.

–Bill