Almost every call about opening up a kitchen starts the same way: someone has been told a beam will cost eight thousand dollars, and they want to know whether that is right. It is usually about right. It is also usually the smallest line in the estimate.
The beam is one of five decisions
When a bearing wall comes out, the load it was carrying does not disappear. It has to travel somewhere, and the drawing has to answer five questions before anyone can price the work:
- What carries the span. A flush beam hidden in the ceiling costs more to install than a dropped beam below it, because the floor framing above has to be cut and hung.
- What the beam lands on. Two new posts, and the studs under them, are cheap. The point load those posts now create is not.
- What is under the posts. This is where budgets move. A post landing over an existing footing is a good day. A post landing in the middle of a basement slab means cutting the slab, digging a pad footing and pouring it — and in a crawlspace it means working on your knees in a space with no room to swing a shovel.
- What the floor does in between. If the new point load lands mid-span on a floor joist, that joist needs help, which means more framing in a finished ceiling below.
- What the wall was doing sideways. Some walls are also shear walls. Removing one can mean new bracing elsewhere in the house, which is cheap in an open wall and expensive in a finished one.
Two kitchens, same beam, different invoices
A Lake Hills rambler and a Newcastle split-level came through the office the same month. Both wanted about sixteen feet of wall gone. Both got a very similar engineered beam.
In the rambler the posts landed in a crawlspace with working height, so the two new footings under them were a short dig and a pour each. In the split-level the wall sat over a finished lower-level family room with a slab floor and no footing anywhere near it. Same span, a similar beam, and the second project cost roughly two and a half times the first — all of it below the beam, none of it visible when the job was done.
What this means when you are collecting bids
A number given over the phone, or from a photograph, is a number for the beam. It cannot be a number for the load path, because nobody has looked at the load path yet. That is the whole reason our engineer is at the first visit rather than after the contract: the attic tells us which way the joists run, and the crawlspace or the basement tells us what the posts can land on.
If you are comparing bids and one is dramatically lower, it is worth asking a single question: what did you assume is under the new posts? The answers are usually more informative than the prices.