It's not a riddle, it's a genuine question lol
Recently recovered a whole load of my old vinyl from a storage unit where it had languished for several years while we looked for a bigger house with room for it! (that's not to say I went without vinyl during that time, but WAF would only stretch to the essential 1000 or so LPs I couldn't be parted from)
Having finally found a house and moved earlier in the year, I now have a 2nd floor 'man-cave' where all the precious vinyl treasures can rest with no negative WAF. I'd like to install some floor-standing plywood vinyl storage boxes along one wall. Probably 3 rows of 4 boxes, with approx 100-150 LPs in each. Then I started to worry about the weight of all that vinyl bearing down on the floor and the ceiling below? At a rough estimate of 1500 LPs, av weight 150gm, that's approx a quarter ton of plastic all in one spot, plus storage boxes.
Now, the house is old (Edwardian) and very solidly built indeed. The floors have pine boards of 20 or 25mm thickness, and there's a void beneath them with solid joists running between the floor and the ceiling of the rooms below. The shelves will run alongside a load-bearing wall which is supporting 2 huge watertanks in the loft that must weigh in at a couple of tons when full of water. I would imagine that the joists are connected to that solid wall under the floorboards so I feel slightly more confident putting the shelves there than say in the middle of a room, not that I would do that anyway, but you see my point.
At the moment the boxes are spread out to spread the weight. Can any structural engineers out there tell me, do I need to worry about that kind of weight? I mean, in the 2nd floor room next door I have a huge old wooden desk loaded with stuff that must weigh more than 150kg and I don't see any bending or flex in the floorboards there.
Do I need to worry about reinforcing the floor first?