Beam Me Up!

Ignore the plaster dust on the after, it isn't permanent! Oh, and the awesome popcorn texturing...

Our house has decorative beams in the dining room and living room. They're pretty unique - we hadn't seen anything like them in any of the houses we'd looked at. 

Can you see them up there? These pictures are from our home inspection, so I wasn't really focused on the beams - sorry!

There was one little catch to it all though, they were falling down. Yep, falling down. The dining room ones were worse, probably because of the light fixtures. And in the nine months we lived there they were getting worse.

Can you see the sizable gap?
It was slowly growing.

It was to the point that I was terrified of sitting in the dining room for fear of being clobbered by the beams. Every time we left for the weekend, I had paranoid visions of them falling down and crashing through the floors or window. It was time to do something.

The hubs did his best to try to figure out how to fix them, but he couldn't figure out how they were put together, but we did know they weren't solid - so the chance of death was lessened. We Googled every key term we could think of, but apparently no one has ever posted about beams like this online. So I will.

Because we're in a new town and don't know who is reliable for repairs, I returned to Google. I found a local carpenter and we had him come out for an estimate and he quoted us $100. I was so excited to have them fixed I agreed. Zach watched him fix it and he used a long 2x4 to hold it up and long screws to screw them into the joists. Apparently they had originally just used finisher brads and nails - it was surprising they had lasted the last 94 years.

Fixed! (and painted!)

Now that we know how easy it was, it definitely wasn't worth $100, but I'm glad they're done! The carpenter did think that they were original to the house (along with the tassel lights). He said that they were probably built onto the ceiling, which is why we couldn't figure them out.

Ignore the bad patch, it isn't from us! We will fix it eventually.

On the left are the beams in the living room, and on the right is the beam in the dining room. The center is the wood on the doorway between them. Weird that they're different right? We like them though, they add a lot of character and style.