Concrete and Steel

They are stripping the concrete wall and installing the steel now. The concrete turned out good but we had a couple of issues of shifting formwork. No worries though, we will be able to deal with these in the framing.

With the design of the structure of the house I decided to use a steel beam to support the major span of the house. This allowed me to avoid a large dropped beam and possible columns in the main living space of the house (the living room and kitchen area). Many times in my practice when ever the mention of steel has come up the first thing everyone says is "oh steel you don't want to use that, it's too expensive". Well yes it is more expensive then a wood structure but you need to look at all aspects that are required. The beam that we used cost us a little over $2000. If I compare this to the cost of the wood beam plus the columns that would have been required to support teh wood beam and subtract that from the steel beam the extra cost begins to drop quite a bit. For that bit of extra cost I was able to open up the space much more and I also get a nice steel beam that can become an integral part of the architecture.

Here is the beam installed to the face plate on the new wall. Looks pretty good!