Hello!
We live in an older house - built sometime in the late 1800s, and likely renovated and extended in stages after that.
Right now, we want to open up the crawl space attic to make better use of that space. This means creating an opening in a wall. The wall consists of a beam in the floor - a square log about 15x15 cm. Toward the ceiling, there's also a beam, slightly smaller, about 12x12 cm. Between these are thick planks that make up the wall structure - they are about 25x8 cm.
The "funny" thing is that the beams don't go all the way through the house; they run from the gable up to the crawl space door (about 4 m into the room), and then they're cut off. I'm not sure what the floor beam rests on - but it seems to have held up so far anyway
The plan is to create an opening in the middle of the wall but keep a section of wall at each end so that the ceiling beam has support at least at the ends. The question is, how big of a hole can we safely make? A friend of mine who is a carpenter roughly estimated "about 2m." What do you think?
We live in an older house - built sometime in the late 1800s, and likely renovated and extended in stages after that.
Right now, we want to open up the crawl space attic to make better use of that space. This means creating an opening in a wall. The wall consists of a beam in the floor - a square log about 15x15 cm. Toward the ceiling, there's also a beam, slightly smaller, about 12x12 cm. Between these are thick planks that make up the wall structure - they are about 25x8 cm.
The "funny" thing is that the beams don't go all the way through the house; they run from the gable up to the crawl space door (about 4 m into the room), and then they're cut off. I'm not sure what the floor beam rests on - but it seems to have held up so far anyway
The plan is to create an opening in the middle of the wall but keep a section of wall at each end so that the ceiling beam has support at least at the ends. The question is, how big of a hole can we safely make? A friend of mine who is a carpenter roughly estimated "about 2m." What do you think?
