Our single-story wooden house with a basement has leca walls. Between the gable walls runs a steel beam that supports the intermediate floor. Along about half the distance (about 5 out of 10 meters), there is a longitudinal wall under the beam. On one of the basement gable walls, there is a window on each side of the steel beam's attachment to the wall.
We would like to widen these windows. The question is, how close can we go to the beam with the windows?
Today, it is 32 and 47 cm from the respective edges of the beam to the windows (the beam itself is 6.5 cm wide). We would like to minimize these distances to get the largest windows possible.
In addition to ensuring that the steel beam has enough wall to rest on, there must also be room to place a leca beam over the widened windows.
So, how wide does the wall under the beam need to be in total, and how close to the edge can the beam be placed?
To fit the windows we WANT, the distances from the beam to the windows would be 12 and 27 cm, which would provide about a 45 cm wide wall in total under the beam (which would not be centered there). Is that possible?
