But, if the pipes or wiring are in the middle of a transfer of electricity or fluids to other points in the home, the work becomes more complicated. Sometimes removing the plumbing or electrical is a straightforward job, especially if the removed material is at the end of a run. There are also electric receptacles and switches, along with plumbing, that may be in the wall to be removed that have to be considered. Go to our blog post What is a collar tie? for more details. Alternate stiffening members must be installed, such as rafter ties or collar ties. When a homeowner takes out the ceilings in a living room, for example, to expose the roof rafters and create a dramatic cathedral ceiling, there’s a new problem that must be solved: the ceiling joists act as a stiffener (by triangulation) to keep the roof rafters from splaying the tops of the walls outward where they bear. There are sometimes secondary engineering issues that may need to be worked out. We still recommend that you consult a construction professional or engineer before tearing down any interior walls or ceilings. These two checks are meant for preliminary evaluation only. For more on this, see our blog post Why is there diagonal bracing at the roof rafters in the attic? If the house has purlins and kickers, the bottom of the kickers wil be over a bearing wall, as shown in the diagram and photo below. The wall under this lap is a bearing wall, but it often buried under insulation. The ceiling joists rarely span all the way across the home, and they will bear on an interior wall, with one rafter slightly overlapping the next one side-by-side at the bearing point. An older house with a roof that is constructed with rafters (instead of trusses) will have horizontal ceiling joists to support the drywall ceiling of the rooms below. Look for where the ceiling joists lap. However, if you see a truss that has an end inside the exterior perimeter walls, then there may be a bearing wall underneath it. Most trusses only require support at the two ends of their span at the exterior walls so a home with a truss roof would rarely have interior bearing walls. Poke your head up in the attic and do the following: But there a few guidelines that can help you figure identify load- bearing walls with reasonable accuracy. And the expensive walls to remove are the load-bearing ones, because some sort of structural element, usually a beam, has to be installed to transfer the weight, that is now sitting on the wall you want to remove, to an adjacent support point.Ī wall is defined as load-bearing if it is supporting some portion of the roof or ceiling in a home, and determining for sure whether a wall is load-bearing requires an evaluation by a construction professional or an engineer. It’s just that some walls are more expensive-sometimes way more expensive-to remove than others. It’s always possible to remove a wall, or part of a wall, in a home.
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