Removing a Load Bearing Wall - are we insane?
We are about to go where most homeowner remodelers fear to tread... removing a bearing wall. Since we moved into this house a few years ago, we've been banging are heads against this wall, thinking, there must be a better way to do the floor plan in this house but what is it? As much as we tried to skirt the issue, the truth is that removing the bearing wall is the best answer to our dilemma.
Our current home with the load-bearing wall still in place:
The house currently has a pretty typical floor plan. You walk in the front door and you are in a tiny foyer. The stairs to the 2nd floor are on your left, adjacent to the wall of the garage (at least, half of the garage wall because in actuality the garage sticks out toward the street on the left of the house).
A hallway stretches out in front of you; you can see right out the back patio door from there. The hallway has a bathroom off of it to the right, and right in front of you as you enter the front door is a door to the coat closet. Turn right, and you walk into the living room. Walk through the living room, and there is a large header over an opening into the little dining room. You have now reached the back half of the house, the long part of the L which forms the main living section. As you turn left you move from the dining room opening through a narrower opening into the current kitchen. Now you have "open concept" because the kitchen has a peninsula overlooking a small nook area (where the patio door is), beyond which is another large header over an opening into the family room (which is about to become our kitchen). I like open concept - the only problem is it doesn't include the living room in the current plan.
It took us a long time to settle on moving the kitchen into the so-called family room. We've actually been using it for our home office, but it's not ideal for that. It's too small to be a family room for us, and it has an elongated shape that makes it awkward for furniture, TV etc. It has a fireplace, but it's kind of an ugly one which we've never used. (If we do follow through with the plan to put the kitchen in the family room, which we probably will, the plans call for the future placement of a brick wood-fired pizza oven in there instead of the fireplace.)
Here's what we have come up with as our solution to the floor plan that just isn't working for us. It give us a spacious kitchen and dining area (which also serves as our home school, so it's important in many ways) adjoining our cozy but just-big-enough living room. The office gets less square footage, but it will serve our needs (I already checked - the furniture fits!).
So, with the kitchen now tucked into the end of the long part of the L of our first floor, there seems to be potential to create more family/living room space out of the remaining area, keeping it open to the kitchen and dining area (basically, the nook and the current kitchen mostly become the new dining room). The plan now is to have the living room primarily in the location of the old dining room and part of the old kitchen, as well as keeping part of the current living room as part of the future one... a larger space within view of the kitchen and dining room.
But remember that header beam I mentioned? When you walk from the current living room to the current dining room, there's a big header over the opening. This is part of the loadbearing wall, which continues for another 8'4" forming the wall between the living room and current kitchen. The load bearing wall then goes on to form the back of the bathroom wall, continues in headers across the hallway and an entrance to the basement, then ends in a pillar.
We would like to take out those 8'4" of wall, as we simultaneously take out the wall that separates the kitchen and dining room (not a load bearing wall) and instead build a half-wall several feet closer to the new kitchen to make more room for the living room and a more manageable-sized dining room (much larger than the old one but not gargantuan.) We will need to make a new header, one that can span the entire length of the opening between the old living room and the old dining room and kitchen... a total of 16'11". We are also building a new wall creating an office out of what is left of the old living room space. Eventually we will also build a screened-in porch or 3-season room off the front of our house, which overlooks a park across the street.
Back to the load-bearing wall we are removing. We have a handyman that agreed to work with us on the various projects surrounding our remodel. He doesn't know about the extent of this project yet, but he did mention that all you'd have to do is replace the load-bearing wall with a header to transfer the weight. He agreed to work with us by the hour, so we are still going to try to do a lot of this ourselves. Therefore, we want to know what we are in for.
I found some helpful articles online:
Calculating Loads on Headers and Beams
and
Sizing Engineered Beams and Headers
This is where I'm starting from at least. I'll be back to let you know what, if anything, I've learned.
Something tells me this will involve math. I was never very good at math.
