Veneta Food Truck Plaza Dining Hall
Veneta: Repairing rot-damaged floor framing and permitting an older wood-framed building in phases so it can serve as indoor dining for a food truck plaza.
Vero Coffee House: From Historic House to Coffee House in Eugene, Oregon
- Location: Pearl Street, Eugene, Oregon
- Client/Owner: Vero Coffee House
- Partners: Bineham Design (designer of the 2010 and 2011 additions)
- Year: 2005–2006 (relocation, foundation and floors); 2010 (patio room); 2011 (deck)
- Size/scale: Two-storey house moved about 15 feet; 21 x 14 ft patio room addition; deck about 28 x 18 ft plus a 6-ft walkway
- JBE services: Seismic retrofitting and structural upgrades, foundation design for a relocated house, floor framing analysis and strengthening for commercial use, construction-phase responses, and structural design of two additions
- Sector: Restaurants
The challenge
The owner of a historic house on Pearl Street, just south of downtown Eugene, planned to move it about 15 feet to the west onto a new foundation and put the ground floor to commercial use, with a residence upstairs. A commercial floor has to carry heavier loads than a home, and the house’s original joists — some of them spliced — were never designed for that. The roof framing was very outdated too.
Project photos
What we did
We designed the new perimeter foundation for the relocated house and checked the existing floor framing against commercial loads. Rather than rebuild the floor, we added beams, spread footings and pier pads beneath it so it could carry the new use, and set a practical limit on concentrated loads that the old joists could safely take. During construction we designed support for a run of spliced joists that turned up and answered the building inspector’s framing comments.
Once the building was the Vero Espresso House, we came back twice: in 2010 for a glazed patio room addition built over an existing concrete slab, and in 2011 for a street-level deck along the south and west sides, with a new door cut through an existing bearing wall.
The result
The house is now a popular coffee house, and it grew room by room as the business did. It opened in May 2009. It shows how change of use structural engineering in Eugene, Oregon can give an older building a new life without starting over.
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Related Projects
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Eugene: As-built drawings, wall design, egress study and a fast permit for a self-serve frozen yogurt wall in a busy burger restaurant near Valley River Center.
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Springfield: site review, civil site design with rain gardens, and value-engineered wood-framed structure for a new drive-through restaurant on Mohawk Boulevard.