"Don Young" wrote in message
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"aemeijers" wrote in message
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"Steve Barker" wrote in message
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If it never had any, why worry about it? Most houses I've ever seen
don't have the nuts installed on the bolts anyway.

Chuckle. Seen (or not seen?) that a lot myself. If the framing crew gets
ahead of the kid assigned **** duties like that, and the floor gets
decked over before anyone notices, it tends to fall through the cracks.
And if the J-bolts are rusty, crusted with concrete, or at a bad angle,
or too short, and the kid isn't a go-getter....

(My old man was the GC or strawboss, so I pulled a lot of punch list duty
as a kid. Putting those washers and nuts on from below, and getting a
socket wrench on them, was often a lot of fun, especially in
crawlspaces.)

aem sends....

I have seen a lot of houses built on cement block foundations without
anything securing the sill plates to the blocks. It does not seem to be a
problem and I am not sure that the blocks would help much in an uplift
anyhow. Houses have been built for centuries just sitting on rock piles or
other supports.

However, I agree that having it bolted down strongly is a good idea. I am
not sure that just bolting the sill plates makes it a strong connection
between the ground and the rest of the house. It would depend a lot on the
type of foundation wall and on the strength of the framing connections.

Not disagreeing- but back in the old days in the midwest, hurricane
straps/earthquake straps would have rated a 'Huh?' As a kid, a pack of
tornadoes came through a Real Cheap cookie cutter subdivision my father was
strawboss on (after his own high-end custom home company went belly up, it
was the only work he could get, much to his embarrasment.) I worked one
spring vaction on the cleanup of that subdivision, which was luckily mostly
still vacant. Several of the houses were sucked up off the foundations, and
the sill plates did stay attached to the joists. The J-bolts were still
sticking out of the concrete block, no nuts to be seen. If The J-bolt is in
a filled block cavity, and if the block foundation has the proper tie metal
every third course, and a rebar in filled holes every X feet, it is pretty
solid. A monolithic pour reinforced foundation would be much stronger,
probably.

If I ever had the money to build a house, yes I would strap foundation to
floor system, floor to studs, walls to rafters, etc. Pretty much what the
California,Florida, and similar region codes require. May only need it once
every hundred years when Mother Nature gets cranky, but it is so cheap and
easy to add during construction, it is real cheap insurance. Retrofit, of
course, is a much more expensive PITA.

aem sends....