Casing the door frame

The engineer had a look around the place on March 18th, to get a first impression. One of the things I asked him was how to support the wall opening which will eventually be the door to our bedroom. You can see in the picture to the left that the joist on the left is bearing down directly on the opening while the joist on the right is also a bit dodgy. Cracks had already appeared in the wall over the opening, so I was interested in a temporary and a permanent solution for this.

I suggested concrete lentils, like you'd use for windows or doors. The engineer said that this more than likely would not suffice. He suggested casing the opening with concrete (with steel rods in it).

First of all, we needed to support the ceiling properly in order to take the weight of the joist enough to allow us the take away the bit of wall that was sagging under the weight of the joist. We used a timber frame to support it.

Once the ceiling was propped and we were fairly sure the house wouldn't fall down, we took down the wall, up to 30cm each side of the gap. The idea was to build a casing using the stiff chipboard that was lying around the place. A timber frame (in a 'u' shape) inserted into the gap supports the case on the bottom.

Whenever the weather gets a bit warmer, we are going to fill the casing with concrete. I checked up on procuring steel rods. The BayWa in Velden has them. The available dimensions are 9mm, 12mm, 16mm and 20mm. I rang the engineer earlier on today to ask him which of the steel rod dimensions would be the best. He is still busy calculating, so he'll get back to me with an answer early next week. Otherwise, I'll go with the 20mm rods as they are not substantially more expensive than the other ones anyway.