General contractors Tom and Charlie Silva have lost count of the number of requests for open-plan kitchens they have heard over the years, and the current This Old House renovation of a 1950s house in Brookline, MA, is no exception.
The homeowners want to open up the kitchen to adjacent spaces and enjoy a great-room-style area with their young family. Cue the beams. “Once you start taking down walls, you need to add structural support in other ways,” says Tom. He and Charlie enlisted the help of This Old House master carpenter Norm Abram and the two latest Gen NEXT apprentices, Erick Ellison and Carly Comitino.
First, the apprentices built a wall to provide support while the work was being done. Then the team installed two 12-inch-thick, 16-foot-long laminated veneer lumber (LVL) beams, supported by two parallel strand lumber (PSL) columns at the ends. With this one key bit of work, the floor plan was transformed, and the new open-plan kitchen/dining area and adjacent living room (part of a new addition) started to take shape. It’s an instant change that never gets old, says Norm: “It’s always amazing to see what a difference it makes to take down even just one wall.”
Opening up floor plans with beams has been a hallmark of This Old House projects for decades. In a 2001 project in Manchester, Tom tackled an even larger bearing-wall removal, replacing a 26½-foot-long wall with a steel I-beam weighing 82 pounds per foot. “It’s strong enough to hold up a house,” Tom said at the time. That project, like this one in Brookline, required weeks of preparation—including constructing a solid brick pier in the basement—before the old wall could come down and the space could be opened into one big room.
The scope of the demolition was extensive. As Tom explained during the project, the team wasn’t just removing one wall—they were rethinking the entire first-floor layout. “This wall comes down and our little kitchen gets huge,” he said. Gone was the wall that separated the long, narrow kitchen from the bathroom, and another wall that once divided the kitchen from the library came down as well, creating a magnificent L-shaped space for dining and cooking.
