Espresso bar: Framing.
'I was a little surprised you just cut into a stud,' K confessed to me the other night. She of course was referring to the 2x6 I hacked out of our wall in order to recess our espresso bar.
I remember thinking at the time how, hmm, that's definitely load-bearing. Then it sat for a couple of weeks until I was able to finish creating the hole I started. That required me to remove another stud. It's after hacking that second one that I distinctly remember thinking, hmm, okay I should probably take a break and do some research about cutting into a load-bearing wall.
Between that realization and finishing the framing I've learned a lot. Framing is pretty fascinating. What I took to be nailing together some 2x lumber is in fact a whole lot more complicated and, dare I say, sophisticated. I have a newfound respect for framers and I find myself staring at new construction to see how things are framed up.
Thankfully, our house never collapsed and I feel really good about how the umpteenth design turned out.
It is narrower than what we originally planned. Which means we have to hack both 36" Ikea cabinets we bought a month or so ago to fit the final rough opening of 27 inches. No worries because we did a lot of Ikea cabinet hacking for our van build.
Backing up first a bit, though…
After my mild panic-induced night thinking, 'Holy crap what have I done!?' I found some helpful photos of the framing for the addition on our house. K swiped these from the architect's Facebook page sometime after we moved in. This first one shows the framing on the right and the giant 2x12" double header spanning the large entranceway between our kitchen and dining room.
That's the beast that kept us from tucking the left side of the espresso bar all the way up against the door trim. On the right side, it was a bunch of electrical cables running up through the top plate that we couldn't move. Each of those limitations forced us to narrow the opening to the final 27" width. It's okay, though.
To some relief then this photo shows what that wall supports.
It's the gap between our bedroom and the old house. Basically, our linen closet. Still, it's also holding up our bedroom. The weight however is a few feet into the room. I won't pretend I'm suddenly a structural engineer. I'm just very thankful nothing collapsed.
I did make a first-thing-the-next-morning trip to Home Depot and picked up a bunch of 2x6 studs to create a temporary support while I worked on completing the framing. That let me sleep a little easier. As I iterated on the design and started reading header span tables, I also called up our buddy John. He runs his family's construction business and has a lot more experience building and framing than myself. He suggested I go with a double 2x6 header. So I did.
That meant cutting out the drywall and 1/2" OSB sheathing where it would go. Then hacking off that 2x6 stud as evenly as I could because it would attach to the header and become the cripple stud that would transfer the weight of our bedroom across the header and down the jack studs.
Once the header was built and wedged in place, I measured and cut the two jack studs. Since the cabinets were going to be installed flush with both of them I used pocket holes to attach them to the bottom plate and to the header. In the process I made sure everything was nice and square.
Then I drove screws to attach the jacks to the king studs.
With that, we had one f*cking solid framed opening. Like the entire wall, probably over-engineered in fact. The dimensions top to bottom and side to side didn't vary across the spans more than one-sixteenth of an inch. It's sort of a thing of beauty, I'm not gonna lie.
I did a pull-up on the header just for fun. It didn't budge. Now it's time to call the drywall contractor and get one step closer to making coffee in our new space.
