Load-Bearing Wall Removal in Newington, CT: One Beam for a 21 ft Line

What the homeowner wanted

A 1988 ranch in Newington with the wall down the middle, running along the ridge between the kitchen and dining area on one side and the living room on the other. The owner wanted it gone for the open layout in his rendering. He had already pulled the drywall off the wall by the time I got there.

What we found

The wall is 9 ft 6 in long and it is bearing. The 2x8 ceiling joists from the front half of the house and the back half lap over the top of it, so it carries the ceiling and whatever is stored in the attic. Just as important, that lap is what ties the rafters together across the house. Cut the joists and you have cut the tie.

The bigger find was the part of the line that was already open. The 11 ft 9 in bay between the wall’s end and the fireplace had been opened years ago, and from the room it looked free. It is not. Up in the attic the owner found a header of three 2x6s above the ceiling, spanning that bay and sitting on the end of the wall he wants out. So the wall and the header come out together, and one beam carries the whole 21 ft 3 in line, from the brick fireplace on the garage wall to the wall beside the basement door.

Then the two ends. At the basement door there is exactly 5 in between the door trimmer and the wall to fit a post, and the post has to live inside the wall because an island goes beside it. At the other end the fireplace sits exactly where the post wants to land. We agreed on two documents: an options letter first, then the permit set.

In the basement a built-up girder runs under the line on steel columns, with the first-floor joists sitting on top of it. I said on site that those columns would not be doing anything after this. Reading the photographs at full resolution corrected that: the girder carries the first floor whatever happens above, so it and its columns stay. There is no column under the spot by the basement door, only a shelf, so a new one goes there.

The engineering

The options letter laid out two ways to do it, a beam for the whole line with no post in the room, or a shorter beam ending on a post at the island. Nine days after the visit the owner opened the wall beside the fireplace and photographed a stud pack against the brick. The day after, his contractor called and walked me through his plan: a steel post hidden behind the fireplace facade down onto the foundation wall, a new column and footing in the basement by the door, and an LVL beam up in the ceiling with the joists hung on it. That is the no-post option in LVL, and it is what the set draws.

Beam B1 is three plies of 1-3/4 by 16 in LVL, set flush with the joist bottoms, standing 8-3/4 in into the attic. Every ceiling joist is cut at the beam and hung on it with an LUS28. The front and back joists of a pair are offset by one joist thickness where they lap today, so at every pair a 2x8 tie block is nailed beside one joist in line with the other, and a CS14 strap runs along the joist and the block, under the beam, to carry the rafter tie through the cut. The straps are not optional. From the first joist cut until the last strap is on, nothing ties the rafters across the line, so the sequence sheet holds that work to two consecutive working days with no snow on the roof and none in the forecast.

Two things I could not measure are carried as bounds. The house depth across the ridge was not taped, so the beam and footing work for any depth up to 34 ft. The span depends on where the fireplace-end post lands inside the cavity, so the beam is designed for up to 24 ft, which covers a post center as far as 30 in behind the brick face. That is why it is a 16 in beam and not the 14 I named in the options letter: the 14 passes at the depth and span I expected and does not pass at the limits the set covers. At the design bound, a 24 ft span and a 30 ft house depth, the beam runs at 79 percent of its bending strength with the top edge unbraced, live deflection L/440 and total L/278.

The footing surprised the contractor too. He had a 16 or 18 in footing in mind. With no soil data the design uses 1,500 psf, clay or silt, and a footing that size carries about 3,000 lb on that soil. The new column brings down the beam reaction plus the share of the floor girder it picks up once it is under it, 10,835 lb at the outer limit. So the footing is 36 in square and 12 in thick, cut into the slab.

What if the masonry at the fireplace cannot be touched?

The fireplace end is drawn to the code’s clearances: 4 in from wood to the back of the firebox, 2 in from the front and sides and from the chimney, and no load on the chimney but its own weight. The steel post and its plates may sit closer than wood can. Nobody has seen inside the cavity yet, so the set carries one hold point: when it is open and before any masonry is cut or the post is set, the contractor sends photographs with a tape in the frame, I look at them from my office, and the set already holds both answers. Detail 3, the post on the foundation wall. Detail 4, a short cross header on two posts spanning the masonry. Work at the other end and in the basement does not wait.

How it got delivered

Site visit on a Tuesday evening in October. Options letter sealed eight days later. The owner’s contractor called on a Friday with his plan, and the permit set and structural letter, ten sheets plus the letter, were signed and sealed the following Monday, four days ahead of the date I had given him. The cover sheet carries a field card, the handful of ordinary confirmations the contractor writes down before material is ordered, each one printed beside the limit the set already covers. If a value falls outside its limit, the fix is a desk change before anything is bought.

If you are in Newington or nearby and you are looking at a wall you think might be holding something up, call me. The visit tells you what the wall is doing, the letter gives you the options with real sizes, and the set is what your contractor builds from.