We have just bought a house where we want to take down a wall in the kitchen to get a more cohesive impression. My question is how to attach the glued laminated beam to the wall. Do you need to brace with a stud against the wall so that it "rests" on them, or can you attach with some kind of angle bracket directly to the wall? The opening will be about 230 cm, but since it is a long narrow room on the upper floor, we were advised to put a beam in the ceiling so it doesn't sag. We would prefer to be able to attach it to the wall since we will have a countertop underneath it and it doesn't feel nice to have to notch for a stud.
A bit hard to see in this picture, but it's the orange wall that needs to be removed.
Additionally, you need to investigate whether the layout/post can stand on something that can withstand the pressure. Now, 230 cm is a fairly moderate span, but even if there's nothing on the upper floor adding extra weight, just the floor, the beam might still need to support a load of around 2 tons, which would mean 1 ton per post.
Sometimes it's necessary to reinforce the foundation for this type of setup (but probably not for such a small load).
As a rough calculation, you can expect the load to be just over 200kg per square meter on open floor space. So if you have, for example, 4.5m of floor in each direction from the beam, you would have just over 20 square meters of floor space. That results in 4000kg, half of which lands on the beam, while the other half loads the outer wall.
If you then have a wall, etc., standing on this area on the upper floor, the load will be higher, and in the worst case, it could transfer loads from the roof trusses or attic.
The foundation is concrete, so hopefully, it should be fine. There is no wall on the upper floor. It's not a load-bearing wall that is being removed, and a small section of the wall on the left side will remain, which unfortunately is not visible in the picture. The load-bearing part is the one visible at the front. Perhaps it doesn't matter. It's about 4.5 meters from the outer wall to the load-bearing part and barely 2.5 meters from the outer wall to the wall we are going to remove.
Can't we just avoid removing the upper part of the wall? Is that sufficient for bearing, or is laminated wood necessary?
As mentioned, probably no problem with the foundation for this relatively limited load. But the fact that it is concrete is no guarantee. Normally, even a concrete foundation is reinforced where there are load-bearing walls, etc. So a column with one or several tons directly down on, for example, an old concrete basement floor, can easily end badly.
I don't know how you intend to carry this out. But you should either hire a construction engineer who can calculate it, or maybe a construction company with its own construction competence. If it's going to be done as a DIY project, you must hire a designer for a construction, with calculations.
Changing the load-bearing structure requires a building notification, and then the municipality should require that the construction is documented (but some municipalities are a bit lax with this).
Of course, we will hire a construction company to do the job. Just wanted to get a little hint of how it's done since we are planning the new kitchen that will be installed later. The idea was to have the stove (and, of course, the fan) at the place where the wall is now, but it will be difficult if a pillar needs to go against the wall, taking up space... As I said, the part we are taking down isn't load-bearing, but we will still check with the municipality and request proper blueprints for the house.
You write that it's not a load-bearing wall, if you are sure about that, then you don't need a beam. Beams are used when load-bearing walls are to be removed or larger openings are to be made in load-bearing walls, and load-bearing walls usually run along the length of the building.
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