Is it Load Bearing or Not?!?!?

How do you tell if a wall is Load bearing? 


     All walls tend to look the same. A cleverly placed bearing wall can be as dangerous as a stealth bomber. Remove one without adequate re-support and all sorts of things may drop down on you.  Bearing walls act as a structural element within your house. They carry and transfer a load from one point to another. In a properly designed home, the loads eventually get transmitted to a foundation. Knowing this, you can work up and locate your bearing walls. But beware, some loads are very well hidden and not all bearing walls are found in the middle of a structure. 


     The exterior walls on houses that support the roof are primary bearing walls. Not all exterior walls are bearing walls though. There are many houses where just the front and back walls are bearing walls. Frequently interior walls that run perpendicular to the run of the floor joists above and below are candidates for bearing walls. But there are many a wall such as this in a home that are not bearing any weight whatsoever. If you discover a wall or a beam directly below this wall or parallel with the wall within a short distance, then the suspect wall may be a bearing wall. Bearing walls are not always stacked one on top of another. This is why detection and identification is not an exact science.


     So the first wall we took down ran parallel to the ceiling joist and was obviously not load bearing. That left us with one final wall to come down. This last wall ran down the center of the area under the middle of the roof. There was nothing about it other than the roof. Se really it now comes down to the method of construction of the roof itself. If I have a truss roof then this wall is most likely good to go. If I have a stick constructed roof we are in trouble and the wall is most likely load bearing. The only way to tell is to open up the ceiling and get up in the attic space.

Hmm is it Load bearing or not?????

     After getting into the attic it was be pretty obvious that the roof was stick construction.

Unfortunately this is what a Stick construction Roof Looks like

 The ceiling joist did even go all the way across the span of the room. They were connected to each other directly over the wall that needed to come down. 

   Final diagnosis is that we have a load bearing wall and now my easy Kitchen demo has drastically moved up in the difficult scale. A support beam will have to be placed in the attic. This beam will have to be spec'd by a professional Structural Engineer and put in place by a professional. I am not going to attempt this one on my own. Little outside of my skill level. It is always nice to have some one else to blame if the ceiling falls in.


   So time to find my help.