Why We Asked for a Beam Instead of Two Posts
Our engineer said the new kitchen island needed posts. We asked whether a steel beam could carry the load instead, and it could. The right answer sometimes depends on the question you ask.
Fast forward to late July/early August: We'd designed a nice new kitchen island, and then the engineer told us the new house structure needed a post in it. Probably two. There were already two posts there when we bought the house and while we'd grown to appreciate them, we had hoped to avoid them in the future kitchen. So I asked about a structural beam. We had the ceiling height for it, and it turned out we could. The steel added real cost and a day and a half of schedule. We're leaving it exposed with a wax seal instead of wrapping it in stained wood. We can always wrap it later. We came close to just living with the posts. The engineer wasn't wrong suggesting them. That was the honest answer to the question we asked. It hadn't occurred to us to ask a different one.