A customer moved into a luxury condo 3 months ago. It was a new build with all of the nicest amenities. She elected to have an enclosed range hood with a facade of heavy granite. A beautiful idea. When the granite installers came in to install the granite they discovered that the entire hood structure relied on a single 2 x 4 that was laid across drywall to hold it to the wall. In other words, 600 pounds of granite was supposed to be held up by a board laid across some drywall. Obviously, this was not going to work.

I was called in for a consultation and devised a plan to anchor the hood structure to the concrete ceiling above. To do this I custom fabricated some anchor pieces to attach to both the ceiling and the box. I did run into a problem, as a delicate sprinkler head was right in my path. This forced me to fabricate a different anchor piece designed to anchor to a reinforced beam instead of the ceiling. Obviously, this was not a typical construction problem. Sometimes you just have to think outside of the box.

Here is the original hood box minus the granite.

This delicate sprinkler head was in the way of my exploration. To trigger it would have been a disaster.
I cut away an area of the ceiling so I could do a better inspection. I protected the sprinkler and stayed far away from it.
It was clear that my ceiling anchor point would have to be modified when I was able to see fully see the situation.
I needed to disassemble the hood box.
And make additional cuts in the ceiling.
Here you can see how tight everything was. The white circle in the upper right corner is the sprinkler head.
This is my original setup. Two custom-made anchor points, some links, and a tension rod to fine adjust the tension. However, I had to make a new top anchor due to the extremely tight working conditions.
Here you can see the two chain support that I devised as well as the reassembled hood box.
A close-up of the bottom bracket. It is very beefy.
Here you can see the new top bracket (in the yellow circle). The arrow points to the delicate sprinkler head. As you can tell it was a very tight fit.
Now it was time to reassemble the hood box. Here I’m attaching Hardie Board to one side.
I’m now attaching the front. I used a lot of screws and adhesive to make sure that the boards were as secure as possible.
Side view of the completed job. The panel on the right was not glued so the installers would have access. They will take care of this when they install the granite. The ceiling will be replaced by the builder’s crew.