Hello all, I have a 2nd floor laundry room, and a front-loading washer. In an unfortunate bit of engineering, my laundry room was placed over my garage (a 20+ foot span of floor with no support underneath). In the final spin cycle, you can feel the floor shaking throughout the second floor, and it's pretty loud downstairs too. I wasn't real worried about it till I started getting cracks in drywall joints, both upstairs and down.
After some research (including Google searches of this group), I thought of three solutions to this problem:
1) Add extra subloor under the washer & dryer 2) Put an adjustable jack post (lally column) directly under the washer 3) Move the washer to the garage where it can sit on concrete slab.I have already tried #1. I cut two pieces of 3/4" plywood to fit the area under both washer and dryer. I screwed the first piece down, into the joists, using 3" screws. Then I screwed the second piece over that, down into the joists. It didn't seem to help at all.
Now I'm getting ready to try my #2 solution - the jack post. Here's where I need advice. My garage ceiling is drywall. After I determine where to position the column, so that it's directly under the washer, how exactly should I attach it to the ceiling? Can I just attach it to joists, or do I have to put a beam up there, and attach to that?
And here's another (probably more important) question: Will this jack stop my house from shaking? My #1 solution was a complete strike-out, so now I'm not all that confident in solution #2. I'm thinking that the (27" wide) washer is sitting on, at most, two joists. If I could somehow get the post to support these two joists, then it seems the spin cycle could not possibly shake the floor.
Thanks for any advice. John