Structural upgrades

This is a bit delayed, but wanted to share a picture before this all gets covered up with walls. Once the basement was demolished down to the structure and concrete, we realized we needed to do some structural upgrades to the house before we could tear out some of the walls that we wanted to.

One large beam for example... at one point had large cuts made through it (we think there may have been duct work going through there at one point, but not anymore). This was pretty much fine since there was a wall under it supporting the beam... but since we wanted to tear out that wall and make the room larger we needed to do something. We could've replaced the whole beam, but that would have gotten expensive quickly. So Matt talked to some of his friends (convenient when you have friends that are engineers) and they decided if we added support on each side of the beam and bolted it together this would do the trick. We had a few other places throughout the basement we did similar things like this as well, but this was the big one.

Picture of the beam afterwards, with added support on each side and all attached together with some huge 12 inch long bolts.