On Mon, 18 Nov 2013 20:50:50 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 11/18/2013 4:13 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:

If it was mine, I'd leave it alone. If that post is in the way of a
doorway or something, put a new post on both sides of the existing post
and then remove it. But I personally think it's best to leave the
existing one alone and work around it. You might damage your whole
house, is that worth the risk?

The risk is minimal if the project is engineered correctly. Not only the
beam size, but the process used to install it.

Bigger projects than this are done every day, all across the globe. Houses
on the Jersey Shore were lifted up and placed on top of 10 ft piers after
Sandy nearly wiped them out. Now that's what I call "risk"!

Seriously, properly adding a properly specced beam to facilitate the
removal of a post is really not that risky.


My step-father was a builder/contractor and this was a simple job he'd
do before lunch. Once he asked if my brother and I could give him a
hand one Saturday. We lifted a living room floor by three feet. The
following week he removed the entire front wall of the brick row house
and rebuilt it.

Easy if you know how. Dangerous if you don't.

Hey, anything can be done, and can be done safely if the proper
materials, tools, and skills are used, but this could cost a fortune,
and seems very extravagant for simply removing a post. I've always
believed that an obstacle in the process of building something is just a
way to be creative, and include that obstacle in the finished result.

For example, I've built an enclosed patio around trees and loved the
final result. I built a lean-to addition on the rear of my garage,
where there is a small pond, and had to use some tricky angles to shape
it so it bordered that pond, with a narrow concrete walkway in between.
And yea, i have had to deal with poles inside buildings and also retain
things like toilets in unusual places, etc. Sometimes the best solution
is to use what's there and create around it.

Sure the post can be removed, but at what cost? (both in terms of
money, time, and other things like headroom, and springiness of the
floor above, not to mention there may be plaster cracks and other
unexpected things).