Moving the wall — installing the beam

Part 10— Designing and building a DIY home recording studio

The whole story — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 23, part 24, part 25

The collection of tools we used to brace the ceiling, remove the existing wall and prepare/install the double LVL beams. What a crazy cool experience!

Before and after

The load bearing wall is gone! All the tools used to move the wall and install the beam are comfortably resting beneath where the wall used to be. As a side note, please ignore the image shift caused by my camera’s slightly wide angle lens. After seeing the “after” picture, it almost looks like the beam has a bow in it so I quickly ran and double checked the level of the beam. The beam is absolutely straight and the supporting columns at the ends are immovable (whew).

The deed is done

So, Paul’s schedule held this time and with his expert help, the load bearing wall is officially moved! Paul was definitely worth the wait.

It required several hours to remove the existing wall, but we did it in a way that we could reuse it. Maybe it would have just been faster to hack it all down and rebuild, but doing it the way we did allows us to have a wall that is ready made and definitely saves money on lumber.

For now the wall is simply moved out of the way a bit and temporarily wedged against the ceiling and floor. Before I can set it in place I need to first make some measurements and start snapping lines on the floor to ensure the build remains absolutely square.

A quick run for lumber

A couple days ago I borrowed a truck and made a run for the rest of the studs needed to frame the double room-in-room walls.

Having to check each board to make sure it is straight and true. I messed up their nice and neat perfectly even little stack of wood, but If I’m paying more than $4 per 104" 2"x4" prime stud, I have no issues being a little picky. Needless to say, this board didn’t make the cut. Too curvy at the end.

72 more studs all ready to be loaded. You can see how many boards didn’t make the cut because they weren’t straight enough. I piled them all on top and behind the stack. I’m sure the lumber guy wasn’t too thrilled to find this after I left.

Half way through unloading the wood there was a sudden storm that prevented us from being able to move the entire load into the basement. I quickly covered the lumber with a tarp and hoped for the best.

Wet wood

When the storm ended I was curious to see how dry the wood still was. Amazing, the wood was completely dry. The tarp covering the wood however, had collected so much water that it became impossible to remove the tarp without soaking the dry wood beneath. Oh well. After 6+ hours of drying it out with a fan it was ready for business. With all the wood in hand I was excited for framing to take place a couple days later.

A rain storm prevented these studs from making it inside before I had to quickly cover them with a tarp. When the storm ended, removing the tarp unavoidably released trapped water onto the dry boards beneath and soaked every stud almost halfway up. It took more than 6 hours to completely dry them. But, they finally dried out and are ready for action. I couldn’t believe how soaked the boards got with such brief exposure to the water. Thankfully it all dried out great and nothing seemed to warp.

Placing a brace under each joist to temporarily support the ceiling so the wall can be removed.

With the weight now off the wall and the nails cut that were attaching the wall to both the floor and ceiling joists, it was then fairly easy to tap the bottom of the wall with the sledge hammer and slide the completely in-tact wall several feet out of the way.

(left) wall is starting to move. Now I just have to finish cutting all the nails holding the top of the wall to the ceiling joists. (right) the wall is completely removed and we slid it almost six feet towards the stack of lumber to make lots of room to install the beam.

With the load bearing wall removed, all that is left is removing a header to make way for the beam.

Girl power!

With the space fully prepared and the two LVL beams securely attached to each other and trimmed to fit, the time had finally come to hoist the beam into place. As luck would have it we were ready about 30 minutes before most of my tall male friends would be home and able to help. My wife quickly contacted her friends and in just a few minutes we had a team consisting of Paul, me, my wife, one of our sons, two of my wife’s friends, a next door neighbor (Ryan) who just arrived home, and two awesome neighbor boys. Willingness of everyone was high but I must point out that the strength coming from the women was outright awesome. Pretty cool they were there and able to make this happen! The one factor we were short on however was, well….height. As you can see in the picture though, that didn’t halt the 100% effort. =-) To make up for the missing height, Paul quickly came up with a solution that let us rest one end of the beam on the support post it was going to permanently rest on and then raise the beam using the assist of the support post to help walk it up to full height.

YIKES, The beam was just ever so slightly too long so it had to quickly come down for a little trim. I say quickly come down because it is quite a heavy beam system and it was pretty intense for everyone for a little bit.

We trimmed the beam and tried again. After persuading the beam repeatedly with the sledge hammer the beam locked into place and there was an audible sigh of relief from everyone. What a crazy, tense experience for everyone.

(left) With the beam mostly in place, the support post is tapped in place to be completely level and square. (right) The bottom plate of the post is attached to the floor using a Ramset which fires a concrete nail into the floor using .22 caliber load. I had actually already done the Ramset nailing (using ear and eye protection), but asked Paul to pose for this one so I could picture it here.

After setting and leveling the beam Paul had everyone take the sledge hammer and remove one of the temporary support studs. It was fun to watch. The beam really opens up the space and now I can configure both the studio and living room doorways as I frame in the outer studio walls.

(left) The mix position will be directly under the beam. This will be really nice because I can pretty much hide the beam with an acoustically transparent cloud system overhead. The cloud will serve as additional bass trapping and be home to both the over head Dolby Atmos speakers and downward facing lights. (right) the wall we removed — which is temporarily wedged in place and is ready to go the moment I have the measurements and lines drawn. Stay tuned!

The whole story — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 23, part 24, part 25