Upper Level Beams Going Up

The layout changes in our house require a variety of structural work. Most of it will be invisible, such as anchor bolts at the foundation or plywood-reinforced shear walls.

For the main structural supports we opted to go with beams versus a moment frame, an option discussed in an earlier post, due to cost and difficulty. Some of these beams will be exposed, supporting the "farmhouse chic" aesthetic in addition to the house itself. Our contractor has already put a few of them in place.

In the dining room, there are two hidden Parallam beams, one hidden in the E exterior wall and one running E-W, transecting the ceiling of the dining room (pictured above). Our contractor has already installed these, and as our early holiday gift even opened up our dining room ceiling for free and raised the rafters, giving us an extra 6" of height! This is something we had opted not to do originally due to cost issues.

There will be one very large exposed Glulam beam running N-S dividing the dining room from the kitchen and living room. Already in place but not permanently installed is another exposed Glulam beam running E-W dividing the kitchen and living room (pictured, below). All of these beams are required structurally, but to balance the space we're adding two additional exposed Glulam beams in the kitchen-living area, for decoration only.

There will also be new beams on the lower level, but we'll elaborate more on them once that work starts.