The Never Ending Saga

To say dealing with the Behemoth's kitchen situation has been a hassle is an understatement.

Before we bought the Behemoth I loved watching HGTV, loved seeing the the home makeovers and the quick turn arounds. Since we've had the Behemoth I've realized that life doesn't always work like that.

Three days to redo a kitchen? Ha, we're going on ten months without a kitchen and six months with a demolished room.

Another thing they never show on those quick & easy shows is the fact that demolishing several walls can change the structure of the house. Because the Behemoth is a behemoth that was built in the 19th century there is a lot of plaster, hard wood and other heavy materials held up by the first floor.

When we ripped out the walls we left one small wall to hold up the ceiling but now that we're getting serious about the kitchen we're ready to remove the wall & open up the space. All along we've thought we'd have to keep a column in the center of the island but lately our engineer has been giving us hope that we could go beamless.

So it was really no surprise when I walked in the door after work to find this.

Jus had to rip down the drywall to see where the joists landed. Now normally this is where my brain starts to get fuzzy I can design what I want the kitchen to look like but when it comes to the bones of the house  I've discovered that joists are important in keeping the house up, and the last thing we want is for the second story of the Behemoth to crumble to the ground.

So by taking the drywall down Jus has allowed us to see that some 10 inch beams run from the back of the house to the middle and some from the front of the house to the middle. Additional 10 inch beams rest on the wall we're planning to take out and some are just hanging out.

Which means we'll definitely need some sort of a beam to make up for the wall but most likely the beam will run horizontally across the ceiling rather than impaling the island.