Structuring Your Remodel: Interior, Kitchen & Bath Remodels
With the local housing market remaining ever competitive, it’s no surprise that many people are choosing to renovate and expand in place rather than upgrade entirely to a new home. The Structuring Your Remodel blog post series will take a look at some of the major remodel components I see the most, and how to best plan for the structural components.
Kitchen, Bath and Interior remodels are some of the most popular places to focus upgrade efforts. We spend a lot of time in those rooms, so why not make them what we want. Furthermore, the new homes of today feature beautiful, large open floor plans melding together the kitchen, living and dining rooms. The open floor plan is a great feature for parents wanting to keep an eye on the littles while they cook dinner, as well as for those who love to entertain, so they’re not stuck in the kitchen, missing out on the time with their company.
From the structural perspective, the first step is assessing what’s in the way of your open floor plan, and what could be involved in opening it up.
Removing Walls for your Open Floor Plan
That wall between the kitchen and the living room can be any combination of the three wall types below. Some are easier to deal with than others. I always recommend contacting a local, licensed professional for an assessment prior to beginning remodel work.
A Non-Structural Wall
Great! With the proper go-ahead from your engineer, you’re well on your way to opening up that space. Prepare for the mess, and be mindful of the age of your home and the risks you may have including lead-based paint and asbestos. When in doubt, contact a licensed professional for an assessment prior to demolition.
A Bearing Wall
This wall is holding up your roof and/or second floor framing from the self-weight, snow, kids jumping on the bed, or Santa and his Reindeer. While not necessarily a huge deal to remove, a bearing wall does need some assessment and design prior to removal.
Wherever you remove structure, there needs to be something put back. Where you remove a bearing wall, you’ll need to put back a beam. Where you place a beam, you’ll need to have columns to support it. One of the most important things to consider when adding a beam and columns is how and where those columns transfer the load all the way to the foundation.
Do you have a crawlspace below the bearing wall? Or a basement rec room? Will a column at that location in the basement impede the function of that space? Perhaps the beam will need to be longer than just the bearing wall to accommodate the column location in the floor plan below. Alternatively, you may choose an additional beam in your basement ceiling to further transfer the load to more ideal column locations. All point loads must have a path all the way down to the foundation.
Speaking of the foundation, it will need to be determined if there is a foundation at that particular location. Oftentimes we can place the columns in the exterior walls to try to avoid a new footing, but not always. It’s certainly a component to be explored further with your engineer.
Finally, the look of that new beam in your open floor plan is a point worth considering. In some cases, it is possible to “tuck” that beam up into the existing framing, but there are some cases where it’s not recommended. For example, if there are roof trusses bearing on your wall, cutting into the bottom of the trusses to hide the beam in the attic space may significantly damage the roof trusses and render them useless. In the case of floor framing; electrical, mechanical and plumbing lines may be in the way of framing your new beam flush with the floor framing.
A Shear Wall
A shear wall is a wall that may or may not be a bearing wall, but also holds your house up against that wind storm or earthquake. Generally shear walls are indicated by specific connections from the roof and floor to the wall, and from the bottom of the wall to the walls, beams, or foundation below, as well as the presence of plywood or OSB sheathing. In some areas of the US, plywood or OSB is not specifically required for a shear wall, but here in the Pacific Northwest it’s pretty much standard.
Shear walls are so specific to each project, it’s nearly impossible to generalize. In the case of a simple rectangular, average sized home, you may not encounter any interior shear walls. On the other hand, if you’re basking in the beauty of a highly custom home with all sorts of angles, corners and fancy roof lines, you may or may not have those interior shear walls.
Removing a shear wall is as project specific as the location of the shear wall. But as with anything structural, when you remove a load resisting element, the load must have a place to go. Your engineer will start with figuring out why there’s a shear wall there. Is there something above dumping load into that wall? Is the geometry of the roof or floor above suited to have a shear wall at that particular location?
Once an existing load can be determined from the existing conditions, a plan can be established to redirect that load to other existing shear walls, or walls that can be modified to become shear walls.
Removing Columns
Your beautiful open floor plan is already mostly perfect, except for that column directly in the middle of everything. If only we could just scoot it over a bit, or get rid of it all together! That column is there because of a concentrated point load coming from above. Of course, to get rid of that column, the load must go somewhere. (Are you sensing a theme here?) Your engineer can determine the load on that column and determine the best way to effectively transfer that load to a more acceptable location. Bear in mind that point loads drive up beam depth and you may wind up chasing your tail to resolve all of the load and keep the structure sizes in check.
Floors
While you’re planning to tear apart your home, now is the perfect time to start dreaming about those fancy new floors you’ve had your eye on. But hold on for a second – some floor systems have specific requirements for the allowable deflection of your floor structure – the amount it moves when its under load. (Do you ever hear your china rattle in the cabinet when you walk by? That vibration is from the deflection of your floor framing. A high deflection, however, does not necessarily indicate that your framing has inadequate strength.)
More than likely your floor framing is fine, but if you’re switching from carpet to a heavy stone tile, or even farther up to a radiant floor system with a layer of “gypcrete”, or similar on top, shoot a quick email to your engineer for the thumbs up. (On a side note, adding significant thickness to your existing floor will have additional implications, specifically at your doors.)
To conclude, there are a lot of ways to get around the structural challenges that your remodel presents. The structural components discussed above will help spark some talking points with your engineer, and help you decide the best route for your remodel given your schedule and budget. Next week we’ll continue the Structuring Your Remodel series with Part 2: Exterior Modifications and Remodels.
Do you have dreams of your own home remodel? Comment below and share your project ideas and questions!
Check out the entire Structuring Your Remodel series!
1 - Structuring Your Remodel - Interior, Kitchen & Bath
2 - Structuring Your Remodel - Exterior, Roof & Decks
3 - Structuring Your Remodel - Basements
Disclaimer: Although I am an engineer by profession, I am not YOUR engineer. All content and information in this post (and on this website) is for informational and educational purposes only, does not constitute professional advice and does not establish any kind of professional-client relationship by your use of this website. Refer to my full disclaimer for more information.