Home Repair 101

With the majority of my experience in carpentry and construction limited to house building trips to Tijuana, Mexico, I have begun a massive learning experiment. Paula and I purchased our house with the understanding that we'd update it and do as much of the work as we could ourselves. Paula has entertained my willingness and eagerness to use our house as a massive learning experiment. So, she's graciously entertaining and put up with all my tangential ideas about different floor plans (which she has many great ideas about), which walls to blow out, and where we should add bathrooms and bedrooms. It's amazing we've made any progress.

Paula and I are settling on a pretty comprehensive floor plan rearrangement which will keep our time and bling invested in the house for a few years, we've begun to make a little progress. In late January, some brilliant friends and I took out a load bearing wall and replaced it with a gluelam (e.g., an engineered beam constructed of laminated pieces of wood). Taking load bearing walls out are super easy...right?

The idea was to blow out the wall between the living room and dining room to create a more open feel (sort of like a half-great room). Above is a picture of the living room taken when the previous owners were living here. The dining room is on the other side of the wall on the right.

So, we built temporary brace walls on either side of the wall we were going to remove. Ahren and Nelson are trying hard to play the role of the stud in the temporary walls.

Once the temporary walls were up, we slid the gluelam into the attic, cut the ceiling joists that were resting on the top plate, removed the top plate, and then fastened the gluelam to new beams and the ceiling joists to the gluelam. Piece of cake. Actually, it wasn't too terribly difficult, although I chalk that up to the Nelson, Ahren, and Matt holding my hand through the whole process.

Now, we've got a large open room that includes a distinct area for dining yet is large enough to make the house feel so much larger. The only problem is that we have a hole in a floor and exposed insulation hanging down from the season. Oh well, we'll sort that out sometime in the next 2 years.