Building Blocks And Building Houses

Whilst many of the concepts that we learn from using building blocks that transfer

to the process of building houses, however - building a house is considerably more complex. Some of these complexities include the housing foundations and wall construction.

Factors affecting your foundation include soil type, foundation wall height and thickness, how much of the foundation is underground (called backfill depth), concrete strength and the use of reinforcing steel (called rebar). If you're building a home, the architect and builder will make tradeoffs between these factors to balance strength versus cost, using Requirements for Residential Concrete Construction and Commentary (ACI 332-10), which provides tables with design alternatives for house foundations.

Load Bearing Walls

From the foundation up, walls define the shape of our living space. Most exterior walls are load bearing, meaning they support the weight of everything above them down to the foundation. Exceptions are houses like a Colonial or Cape style house, where the roof is supported by the front and back walls of the house. Taking a lesson from our childhood, our building blocks showed us that each of the openings in the structure must have good support below and above the opening, just like load bearing walls.

Framing and Removing Walls

Today many homeowners want to combine rooms to create more open, visual space inside their homes. However, removing any of the building blocks may cause the rest of the building to collapse. Interior walls may or may not be load bearing and you've got to determine which walls can be removed easily (i.e they're not load bearing). Walls that are load bearing can usually be removed by adding structural support in one of several ways. Some examples of projects my handyman team completed:

Open up kitchens with a half wall and posts to provide structural integrity and this approach works for any room, i.e. creating combination living/dining rooms, kitchen/family rooms, etc.

Create an inside window (opening) between a kitchen and family room, with a ledge for passing things through.

Move a wall to create a larger entryway with a view of the beautiful Victorian staircase.

Make closets larger by taking space from an adjoining guest bedroom.

Punch through a kitchen wall, leaving supporting studs with headers, for more structural support.

Push cabinets into the dining room to gain space for a kitchen island. Another time, we pushed a refrigerator into an oversize bathroom to make it easily accessible to the kitchen, eating area and family room in a new open concept space.

these ideas are meant to show you when you have a goal, there is a way to change your home to support your lifestyle!

by: Tina Gleisner

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