It's Beam Fun

As promised, here are photos of the beginning of the second beam installation. Hopefully we'll get some time to attach it this weekend, but we're not holding our breaths, as hanging out with family not often seen definitely takes precedence. But we'll do our best.

Now that you've seen the new floor plans, these next photos will hopefully be as exciting to you as they are to us, since they're the first steps in making our sweet little rat hole a fun, usable house with good space.

In this picture, you can see that we're putting up the braces to support our roof while we do work on the beam. This is the third time we've had to support our roof while working on the house, for those of you counting. I doubt it will be the last.

In this picture, we've removed the roof supports, the old beam, and some of the old framing on the left (we left the paneling in the other room intact, seeing as how that's one of the few rooms we actually live in).

And now here we are with the new framing taking place. You can see the new wood that marks the edge of the closet and where the new south wall of the den/living room will be. We actually got down to the subfloor in the excavation of the old framing in that section, and it looks like the original 1935 wood floor. It's sorta neat. It'll be interesting to see what it actually looks like when we tear up everything above it.

And finally, we have the beam.

It's not attached to anything yet, as I've mentioned before, but it's up there, ready to be installed. It was MUCH easier than the previous beam! Anyway, you can see where the two ends of the beam are. One end rests on the new closet space, and the other is where we'll put the other post (and eventually the fireplace). The wall that's visible underneath the beam will all be taken away and provide a nice, wide pass-through between the den and the dining room.

I think this weekend, between family events, we might go look at antique front doors, which really, really excites me. Funny, I've ALWAYS hated shopping, but I sure do love shopping for stuff to use in or on my house. Go figure.