tl;dr ahead, you have been forewarned.
Last year my wife and I purchased a house in Boulder, CO that's a complete gut rehab and I've been at it since June 2022. The goal is to finish the entire lower level ~1150 sqft followed by the "workout" room and master bedroom/bathroom ending with the kitchen/living room. We're about 70% through the lower level and we hope to finish by the end of 2023. Doing most of the work myself, hiring out contractors to do the **** I don't know how to do i.e. concrete, tile, flooring, etc. I'm doing all of the rough and finish carpentry, electrical, most of the plumbing, etc.
The weirdest thing about the house is there was a support pole in the middle of the master bathroom.
Naturally we wanted to move the pole two feet into the wall behind the mirror so we hired a structural engineer to create the drawings on what it would take. Since this is a two story house with a main and lower walk out level, we'd have to transfer the new load through the lower level into the foundation. Step one was to create a proper footing for the relocated support pole. Along with the footing, we had to add support for the front foundation wall and repour about a third of the lower level slab due to the original slab settling and sinking about two inches down.
Here's most of the slab busted out and we took the two dividing walls out to make life easier. The support footing will be located in the middle room where the floor is busted on the far right.
Top left rebar is where the footing will be, the long trench holds rebar that will help retain the exterior foundation.
Finished floor:
Now it's time to locate where the new post will go so we used a plumb line from the center beam all the way to the foundation:
The aluminum plates screwed to the subfloor is for the radiant heating system I'm installing which is another post.
Had a schedule 40 steel pole made by a local steel company. Surprisingly cheap at $135. First order of business was to attach it to the floor:
Followed by some serious blocking between the joists. Got to make sure it's straight!
Now we went upstairs to build the support for the beam in the wall. The two outside 2x4s get screwed into the side of the beam.
Now that the beam load was supported in the wall it was time to remove the post in the bathroom. I hired the contractor that used to take care of the house for the previous owners to help with this part. We added a temporary support post to hold the beam while we removed the existing post.
Since this was the location of where two beams joined we needed to attach a steel plate on each side to join the beams together:
Note the difference between the two bolts and the fact we went from four to twelve bolts.
No more post in the bathroom!
In the lower level we had to rearrange the walls a bit to hide the new post.