Opening Up a Wall: What Massachusetts Homeowners Should Know

Older homes around Greater Boston were built for a different way of living — small, separate rooms, each with its own door. Opening a kitchen into a dining room, or taking down the wall between a living room and a hallway, is one of the biggest quality-of-life upgrades you can make. It's also structural work, and it deserves to be treated that way.

First question: is it load bearing?

The honest answer is that you often cannot tell from the room. Walls that run perpendicular to the floor joists frequently carry load. Walls stacked over a beam or a post in the basement usually do. But additions, remodels and previous owners' projects have a way of changing the load path in ways that aren't obvious from either side of the drywall.

We look in the basement, look in the attic, check the joist direction, and where there's any doubt, we open a small inspection hole rather than guess.

If it's bearing, here's what's involved

• An engineered beam. Sized for the actual span and the actual load above it — often an LVL, sometimes steel for longer spans.
• A real load path. The beam has to land on posts, the posts have to land on something that carries down to the foundation. Setting a beam on a stud wall that sits on an unsupported floor just moves the problem.
• Temporary shoring. The load has to be carried on temporary walls while the old wall comes out and the new beam goes in.
• Permits and inspection. Structural changes are permitted work in Massachusetts. An inspector will want to see the beam and its bearing before it's covered.

The beam is the easy part. Getting the load all the way down to the footing is the part that takes thought.

What else lives in that wall

Almost never is a wall just framing. Expect to find some combination of electrical circuits, switches and outlets that have to be rerouted, plumbing vents that must stay vertical, and heating — in a lot of local homes, baseboard or old radiator piping that has to be re-run. On the second floor of a colonial, that HVAC or plumbing chase can drive the whole approach.

Flush beam or dropped beam?

A dropped beam hangs below the ceiling. It's simpler, cheaper and faster, and in a room with decent ceiling height it can read as an intentional architectural element. A flush beam sits up inside the floor system so you get an unbroken ceiling — cleaner, more expensive, and more work, because every joist has to be cut and hung off the new beam with hangers. Both are correct. It's a budget and aesthetics call, and worth making deliberately.

Don't forget the floor and the ceiling

When the wall comes out, you're left with a stripe of missing flooring where the bottom plate was and a matching scar in the ceiling. Weaving new flooring into existing so the patch disappears is skilled work. Homeowners who budget for the beam but not the floor weave are usually the ones caught off guard.

Thinking about opening up your first floor? Give us a call — we'll walk it with you and tell you honestly what's involved.