Don’t let it fall down

Additional Support Needed

We faced our first major construction project after demolition got underway. In some of our demo pictures I’m sure you could see Josh tearing out an existing wall which we had made sure was non load bearing, but given the age of the house and the condition of the house we were advised to add some additional support.

“You just have to run a beam from one end of the house to the other.” Not quite as simple as it sounds! The house is 30 feet wide and based on where the original wall stood we divided that span into one 12 foot beam and one 18 foot beam. The 12 foot beam was constructed out of (4) 2x10s secured together which was easy enough to assemble. The 18 foot beam, however, was an entirely different story. Given the length of the beam and the support we were looking for we had to make this thing very differently. We still used (4) 2x10s except these had to be a harder wood than the others and sandwiched in between them was a steel flitch plate. For those of you who don’t know what that is, which we certainly didn’t, it is a 1/2 inch thick piece of steel that gets bolted to the other pieces of wood and works as a girder supporting your house. It is incredibly strong, which in turn makes it incredibly heavy, which in turn makes it incredibly scary to install.

Here’s where we roped in more unsuspecting victims to our novice renovation project; my dad and brother. These poor guys drove up to the house for the weekend and helped us assemble both beams. Once that was over they looked at us and said “so how are you getting these up there?”. Our blank stares in response seemed to make it clear that we had planned on them helping us to lift them into place.

We had secured posts inside the walls on either end of the house and erected an adjustable post In the middle so that we could more easily slide the beams into place and then jack them up to the height we needed. Handling the 12 foot beam was actually going to be easy, relatively speaking, but when it came time to put the monster up above our heads I think we all said a silent prayer.

There were several unsuccessful attempts at the monster beam and to be total honest I think I kind of blacked some of them out. They had Josh on one end and my dad on the other and Brandon in between at which point they realized that my dad wasn’t quite tall enough to get his side into place. Someone suggested that he stand on a milk crate which was met some obscenities and putting the beam back on the floor. At least once someone yelled “I can’t hold it” and thats about the time that I picked up my beer and went out to the porch.

I really couldn’t tell you what the strategy was that finally got the beam into place but we were super excited about the accomplishment! It was a bit of a worry that none of us wanted to be the first one to actually walk underneath it though…