One thing I don't see discussed very often on ahr is sheer strength. AIUI, houses with a lot of doors and windows often use an interior wall not only for load bearing, but also for sheer. It's worth considering. When I added a window and a pocket closet door in the bedroom, I had to make sheer strength modifications to what was left of the walls.
On 4/24/2008 10:46 PM Smitty Two spake thus:
I think you meant to type "shear". But your points stand.
People who rip out load bearing walls are normally idiots. The wall was put there for support and is intended to stay there. If you want a visual of the next room, put in a few smaller windows so only every other stud is removed and beef up those that stay.
People who think that a house is going to remain solid and survive in severe storms leave their houses with their original structures. Only those Saturday morning home re-make shows knock out load bearing walls to create lots of open space. Of course the tv viewer never sees the house a few years later when the roof sags, or sees what occurs during a tornado.
An excellent example of frontier gibberish spoken with the conviction of someone who has no knowledge of construction. Aspiring trolls please note.
R
Wayne-
Yes, the beam, if cambered properly, would deflect to a straight condition.
But the ceiling / 2nd story floor would have to be jacked along with the beam for the entire system to have no deflection....you would need to enforce displacement compatibility (& a raised starting point) to prevent a sag when the walls were removed.
It's kinda like getting a sistered joist to really share the load.
cheers Bob
Yep, thanks. Not too many homonyms fool me, and that's a bad one to get wrong since it changes the meaning of the word. Shear it is, and I'll remember it.
Good point. I guess if the joists are unloaded at the time of installing the precambered beam, it wouldn't be too hard. You could just clamp/jack each joist to the pre-cambered beam one at a time before fastening them.
But if the joists are attached to each other transversely at the time of beam installation, then you have to jack the whole system, and in the shape of the pre-camber. That could be trouble, but doable.
Cheers, Wayne
That sounds like a good idea. I can tear out a foot or so of the drywall on the ceiling on either side of the bearing wall and remove a foot of drywall on the side walls both directions. Then take pictures of everything including the crawl space under all this. Then provide this along with measurements to the engineer.
Note: Under all this is are TREE TRUNKS! This is an old house built in the
1930's. For support beams under the house... Under each outside wall and under each bearing wall, there is an entire 11 inch round tree trunk with the top side sawed flat and pier supports under it. Actually there are already pier supports at both ends of where the bearing wall ends (Where supports for a beam would go).The 2nd floor (1st floor ceiling) has closely spaced 2 x 4 joists resting on this bearing wall (the 2 x 4's span 10 ft.). And not evenly spaced either. I don't think this is enough support (I would think 2 x 6's would be better), but the house is still standing - just "creaks" a bit when walking upstairs!
Note that the upstairs sub-floor is nailed into these 2 x 4's with zillions of nails. So ripping out the 2 x 4's and replacing with 2 x 6's would be fun!
I understand that I would need to support everything on either side before removing the bearing wall and that I would need to transfer the load down through the subfloor.
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