Structural Work for Older Hawthorne Homes
You can stay home while an older Hawthorne house is bolted and braced from the crawl space. A new beam closes off only the room it sits over.
Can we keep living here while the work goes on? In an older Hawthorne house, a bolting and bracing retrofit is done entirely from the crawl space, so the family stays, cooks and sleeps as usual, with some drilling noise in the daytime. A beam job asks more. The room under the new beam is closed off behind plastic for a stretch, and every other room carries on as normal. We lay that plan out with you before work starts.
A retrofit from below
We get under the house through the hatch, and tools and plywood are handed in from the yard. Inside the house, the sound of a hammer drill on concrete carries through the floor, and that is the main disturbance. Water, power and gas stay on, apart from short planned shutoffs if a line has to move. Anchors go through the sill into the stem wall, and plywood panels are nailed to the short framed walls on the pattern the plan sets. Nobody needs to enter the rooms above.
When a beam comes in
Opening a bearing wall is the job that asks the family to give up one room. Shoring walls go up on both sides to carry the ceiling, a plastic partition with a zip door holds dust inside, and a fan pushes air out a window. The building department serving Hawthorne approves the engineered plans, and its inspector checks the posts, beam and connectors before anything is covered. Picture rail, door casings and plaster outside the cut line are protected, and pieces removed by hand are stored in the house until they go back.
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Structural Work in Hawthorne: common questions
Start under the floor if you can get there. A sill plate with no anchor bolts, or cripple walls with bare studs and no sheathing, mark a house that has never been retrofitted. In the rooms, look for a door that drifts open, cracks fanning out from the corners of windows, and floors sloping toward the center of the house.
Expect a permit either way. A standard bolt and plywood retrofit can usually use a prescriptive plan, which spares the engineering. Removing a wall that carries the ceiling, or setting a new beam on fresh footings, brings in an engineer, and the reviewer at the building department serving Hawthorne approves those drawings before work starts.
Upstairs rooms are never opened for a retrofit. With a beam, only the strip of ceiling along the beam line is cut, and casings and molding nearby come off whole, each labeled on the back. The plaster patch is built up in coats and textured to meet the old surface, so the repair stays hard to spot.
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Other work we do in Hawthorne
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