framing the kitchen and dining room

framing the kitchen and dining room turned out to be more straightforward than we expected. perhaps it's that we found a lot of other interesting stuff going on inside the walls.

we learned the original ceiling members over the dining room and hallway were joined simply by nailing together, resulting in a zig-zag beam, not using a nail plate to keep them in line. not only that, many of the nail joints weren't even resting on the hallway wall!

our engineer specified tying the new 2x8s to the existing 2x4 dining ceiling members. in order to do that, we had to add an additional 2x4 piece next to the hallway member - the 2x8 is tied next to the dining room ceiling member. hard to explain, so i've included pix on flickr to illustrate. we had to do this because we're removing the hallway wall, so we needed to beef up the ceiling as it also is supporting several roof joists. Bob's team had to mill the ends so they fit into the roof/soffit termination.