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Continued..
Inside the wall I am hiding this extremely stout screw jack. I felt it was important to use steel here because this beam will hold up two cross beams and the two cross beams will hold up the future master bath. Besides, I have the steel and I can.
 Over-kill is a repeating theme in this renovation/restoration. It costs so little to go first class when you are doing the work yourself. Plus having really good connections at the local scrap metal yard also helps.
 Here is what I am talking about. The round tube on the right is a piece of a standard screw column (or lolly column) that is approved by all standard building codes. It is very very thin walled and light weight. My material of choice on the left however is extra thick walled and weighs four times as much as the lolly column.
 The top-plate that comes with the standard lolly pole is another area where there is room for improvement. This cheap stamped sheetmetal plate may be alright for the building codes but not for me. I went with half-inch steel plate with a washer welded to the top to center the screw.
 Here we see the plywood wall covering the steel column. The half inch metal lift-plate was wider than the space between the walls so I had to notch the plywood. Once the white boxing lumber is in place you won't see any of it.
You can see here the two cross beams. The main beam is just out of camera. You can see that I started to wrap the heavy wood with nicer 1-by20 finishing boards. I also started to fill in the coffered with bead board and crown moldings.
 Trying to get the whole room into the photo I used a wide angle lens attachment for my digital camera. It got quite distorted. You can however start to see the bigger plan for the ceiling on this half of the room.
 Here is a close-up of one of the corner coffered There are nine coffered in all on the dining half of the kitchen. On the cooking half of the kitchen I chose a slightly different design.
 The coffered continue to fill in. What an insane amount of work this turned into. All the little cuts that had to meet in the corner just exact. One bit of poor planning is the dimensions of each square. Four foot and four inches. Why was this such poor planning? Because the very detailed and expensive dental-crown used came in eight foot lengths. There was a lot of waste. For someone who prides himself one reusing old lumber and optimizing board-feet, this totally sucked.
 More and more detail comes together. White paint, bead board and paintings. The feel I was going for starts to peak through.
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