It’s almost time to remove the load bearing wall in the middle of my house. For new readers, I’ve already made a series of posts about my foundation repair and here.
The piles have all been driven, and the city has inspected them and given approval. One pile went a little wrong, perhaps driven a little fast and too enthusiastically, but wasn’t deemed a serious problem. Still to be done on the piles are to fill the hollow pipes with concrete.
In the meantime however, the empty pipes of the piles are the most stable thing in the house, so they are building the support structures needed for the load bearing wall removal on top of the pipes. You can see on the bottom left of the picture below, a section of pipe sticking out of the floor.
The support structure above is built on 3 pile pipes, and is about a half meter off the floor. On the right side of the picture, you can see a hole in the wall. That part of the wall was in a particularly bad state, and basically fell apart as they were installing the support. In front of the hole, you can see the pile of bricks that came from the hole.
The picture below was pretty much taken of the same angle, but of the ceiling. You can see how the steel bars are supporting the ceiling. This same sort of support was built along both sides of the load bearing wall.
Below is the support structure built used along the outer walls.
It’s really been a big undertaking to build this support structure! It was built, then the contractor came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the construction engineer came along and decided it needed to be changed, then the contractor wanted to change it again.
Today the city came along to give their final approval to remove the wall. The good news is they gave their approval, but the bad news is the support structure needs to be changed again and strengthened! The city also wants a simple support installed on the front of the house.
It’s probably a little more interesting for the Europeans reading this, but the bricks in my house are very special. They are the original ones used to build my house 350 years ago, and they were all handmade. The guy doing the demolition work has been removing them one at a time, cleaning and stacking them.
The contractor tells me they are worth money! At a yard sale they apparently go for €2-3 a piece. I don’t know if I’ll pay back the cost of my foundation that way, but they are clearly an important part of the history of my house.