Charlie: And then Jay in Greatwood has our final question this morning. He says I’m interested in removing a wall to enlarge my kitchen in a two story house. It backs up on a short hallway. How do I know if that’s a support wall, and if it is, can I replace the floor joist or something to increase that span across the three foot hallway? Podcast: Play in new window
Tom: You can always take care of the problem structurally. It just depends how much money you have. Charlie, you did that giant beam over here at MogerMedia, and you know that it’s just going to be what it is. But as far as how do you know, if you don’t have an attic above and it’s floor joists and not ceiling joists, then you got to tear the sheet rock and see if something’s sitting on it. It’s either the floor joists are going perpendicular or parallel. If they’re parallel, you’re fine. If they’re perpendicular and they’re spliced on top, you’ve got to create a beam system like you did here and support the load, so beam goes to two posts and the posts take it to the ground.
Charlie: Yeah, there was no framing plan when we bought this building.
Tom: You can find one.
Charlie: And so TriFection had to go and tear this … cut holes in the ceiling to figure out how the building was assembled, and sure enough, the wall we took out was a load bearing wall. And then to add fun to that, the city said if you’re going to put a beam across there, it’s going to put … what did they say … 10,000 pounds on each end on the supporting member that’s coming up to it, so as a result, we had the added pleasure of adding piers underneath those two beams, so it was awesome.
Tom: Now there’s two ways you can do it. You can do a drop beam like you did, so you have to sheet rock around it or trim it up.
Charlie: I hated sheet rocking around it, because I’ll tell you, that beam was a thing of beauty.
Tom: Well, that’s … yeah, it’s a pre-engineered beam. Or you can put it up inside of the joist and hang the joist with joist hangers. You can get a clean ceiling or you can do a drop beam depending what you want.
Charlie: Well, I was cheap. We had the drop beam.