We have already talked about how important a good solid foundation is for the
house. The footers and the concrete block walls have the task of supporting
the outside walls of the house. What supports the center?
Here we are getting the wood beam level and set in place
Most houses have some sort of support mechanism that will support the center
of the house, whether it is a wall, a steel beam or what we did, a wood beam.
What you want from your basement determines which avenue you choose when you decide
on your support mechanism. Building a wall down the center of the basement is the
easiest, although you have to wait until the basement floor is poured and if you plan
have any bathrooms or laundry rooms, you will have to wait until the rough plumbing
is done or plan to cut up your cement later.
A steel beam is the next easiest method of supporting the center of your house. The
beam is set in place by a crane with the beam resting on steel posts that you set under
the beam while the crane holds it in place. This provides you with a nice clear span with
minimal amounts of steel posts in the middle of your basement. You do need to rent a crane
for this method.
The final method, the wood beam, is what we chose. In order to set a steel beam, we would
have had to rent a crane and crane in our area only work Monday-Friday. We would not have
been able to get enough people to help during the week, so that was the first factor. The
second factor was cost. A wood beam can be built for about half the cost of a steel beam
and is every bit as strong as a steel beam. A steel beam does allow you to go a greater
distance between steel posts, but in our area, the distance allowed by code was sufficent
for us to do what we want in the basement.
After deciding all of this, building the wood beam was relatively simple. We set up scaffolding
in the basement at the height that the woodbeam would end up at. The mason had already cut the
slots in the concrete walls and the cement pads underneath where the steel posts would go had been
poured. We took two 16' 2x10's and offset them by eight feet and nailed them to gether. We
continued this the entire way across the basement. Once we had a beam that was the length of the
basement and two board thickness, we set it into place. On both sides of the beam, we then nailed
another 16' 2x10 so that the wood beam ended up being four boards thick.