The verdict is in and too many walls are out. Sectioning off parts of the homes into smaller areas often leads those spaces to neglect. How can we open our homes up and make the square footage we have more functional and more aesthetically pleasing?
Question posed by Rachel on Facebook
Load-bearing walls can come in all shapes and sizes. To able to know how to remove them, we need to know how to identify which walls are carrying “load”.
What is Load?
For simplicity’s sake, Load is the weight placed on the structure. There are a few different types of load to consider though. What we commonly think of is considered “dead” load which is the vertical weight of the structure to support itself. The other type of vertical load is “live” load. This is the weight placed on the structure by the occupants such as furniture, your fully filled soaking tub, or the dozens of people at your holiday party. When removing walls, we are usually referring to dead load as we are changing how the structure supports itself.
How to Identify a Load-Bearing Wall
When thinking of carrying load, the weight goes from the item that needs to be supported all the way down to the foundation. Often that weight is in a straight vertical line throughout all of the levels of the home, but there are other ways to support that may not be so straight forward.
Exterior Walls
Let’s start with the easiest ones. Anything on an exterior wall is considered load-bearing. That’s because the roofing members carry weight onto those walls.
Staircase Walls
The next easiest ones to spot are typically walls around a staircase, which if you think about it, are holes cut into the flooring or ceiling members. The flooring systems along with the weight of the staircases themselves need to be supported around those cutouts. If you go down and look at your basement, crawlspaces, or foundation, you will typically find beams and posts in those areas. Keep looking around to find more signs while you’re done there. More posts, metal beams, multiple large wooden beams mounted together, cinderblocks, and concrete walls are all tell-tale signs of load support in one form or another.
Ceiling Change
Say you’re standing between two rooms such as a Kitchen and a Great Room where one has a 10′ ceiling and the other has a 20′ ceiling, that’s another easy find. Just like the staircase, where part of the structure was cutout out to make room, it’s the same idea for a vaulted space. That weight is typically being carried down onto the wall in the shortest orientation of the space
Roofline Change
Another dead give-away is to go outside and look at the roofline. If a roof line is coming down on what appears to be where one of your interior walls are, it’s likely carrying that load in some way.
Centrally Located Walls
The next most obvious ones are walls that seem to be located in the center of the home and stretch from room to room. Now this is not always true, but can be confirmed by looking in the attic. If you take a peak up in the attic and see if the area in question was built with rafters or trusses, it will be easier to determined if load is carried in the middle of the home or not.
Trusses are smaller framed web-like structures that typically span the entire roof width. They are engineered to support the weight of the roof load typically without any support in the middle which is the importance of why they are built like webs. Those interior pieces are redistributing the load in different ways to span the distance.
Rafters are created out of more traditional stick built lumber using larger members such as 2×8’s, 2×10′, and 2×12’s. They are carrying the load to the exterior walls, but don’t have all of the interior support a truss has which may require more support by the interior partition walls below. Most older homes will have been built with more traditional rafter framing versus trusses. Although rafters will be used often in new construction or different remodels in order to achieve more interesting roof and ceiling lines that trusses can’t support.
If you see that there are trusses spanning all the way across from one end of the roof line to the other, it’s a safer bet that the interior partition walls below are not carrying the load from above. If there are rafters in the attic, then there’s a higher probability that if you plan to change those interior partition walls that they will need to be configured in a way to carry that load.
Which Ones Can Be Modified or Removed?
Now that we have a good idea of which walls may be carrying weight, we need to start figuring out which can be modified or removed. Don’t fret, there are many ways to modify a load-bearing wall. Let’s start with the basics.
Minor Structural Modifications
If your goal is to widen an existing opening or add a new one such as a doorway, passthrough, or window, these are fairly easy modifications – most of the time. In most homes, you’ll notice about a foot of space above your windows and doorways (in higher ceiling homes, that space will be 2 or more feet). That space was reserved for the header that is carrying the weight of the cutout below it.
If you look in the basement or crawlspace and there is a beam of some sort below the wall you are eyeing for removal/modification, you can widen or create that new header in the room above because the weight is carrying back down on the beam below. If there’s a post below, it may need to be relocated or more may need to be added to support that weight all the way down to the foundation.
Major Structural Changes
These changes are very similar to the ones above, but often structural engineers or architects are brought in to determine how to carry the load. It may mean more posts, it may mean larger beams, or it may mean expensive steel beams.
Depending on the weight and the opening size, contractors may build temporary walls parallel with the one they plan on manipulating in order to carry the weight until after the process is done
More Than Load
Also keep in mind that it’s not just load that we’re worried about redistributing. If the plumbing from the 2 bathrooms upstairs or the heat ducts to the second floor carry through the wall you plan to remove, those need to be modified as well.
- Electrical is the easiest to move. These wires are flexible and can be junctioned to extend to new spaces.
- Plumbing supply lines are the next easiest as they are fed with pressure.
- Cold-Air Returns are fairly simple as long as you can find a path back to the furnace. Their location on whichever wall in the room is less important and driven more by their path to the furnace and their aesthetics
- Plumbing Drains are harder to relocate. You’ve heard the proverbial phrase “Sh*t rolls downhill” which can be used literally in this setting. These drains are gravity based and need to be pitched at a certain angle over a certain amount of length in order to work properly making them one of the most difficult to relocate.
- Heat Ducts in my opinion are one of the hardest to relocate. They’re bulky by nature and the existence of all of the other mechanical occupants within your walls limit the places they can be moved. On top of that, if they get too far away from the furnace, they lose their pressure and their heat and are rendered useless
Exposed & Flush Headers
There are two ways to install a header. What we see typically is an exposed header which is the beam over doors, entryways, etc. What we can’t see are the headers that have been flush mounted up into the ceiling. I often try to decide the header based on how it’s going to affect the space. If I need to terminate ceiling beams, a exposed header is great. If an exposed header is going to cut into a room in an undesirable way, I want to do a flush header and disappear it into the ceiling. These headers are more expensive because of having to cut all of the ceiling members and bracketing them to it. The beams are usually longer and larger to be able to stretch larger distances as well.
Keep in mind, if there’s a will, there’s usually a way. Knowing how these systems work, their limitations, and who can complete the work is why you or your general contractor hire professionals to relocate these items. As for determining the best route to modify or remove a load bearing wall, you should consult with a licensed and insured contractor, structural engineer, or architect depending on your needs.
The Consultant’s Thoughts
This question is a little more personal to me because the person asking is family. Rachel, my sister-in-law, has been struggling with wanting to open up her kitchen for as long as she’s owned this home. It’s a beautiful older home with an itty bitty kitchen that has 3 entries and a staircase off of it. There’s a lot to consider that is very specific to her, but this is how I would think through her dilemma and hopefully it may help you as well!
Because of the age of the home, I would put money on the wall between her dining and living room being load bearing as it splits the house in the center from front to back. In the basement, there will likely be matching beams supporting the flooring joists from the exterior walls into the center of the house. There’s a chance that this beam will be able to support the wall changes, but I would recommend additional jack posts to be safe. Jack posts are used to relevel structures that may have shifted due to weight or sagged due to age.
She is lookin to open this wall another 5′ or so which I don’t see anything stopping her. If she wanted to, she could likely take the wall all the way back to her staircase which would open her entire kitchen up, but the issue becomes relocating all of the heat, plumbing, and electrical that is supplying her master suite above. It may be worth it to only open up the 5′. Based on the hundreds of projects where I’ve removed load bearing walls, this would be on the easy-medium end of the difficulty spectrum and that’s all because of the age of the home. There were different codes back then and who knows how they actually built it until the wall is opened up. The beam would likely be made out of 2×12’s or laminated “lam” beams which material costs would be fairly minor in the low hundreds. The work would take about 1-2 days. All said and done, this is probably a $2,000-$3,000 investment. If she wanted to open it all the way, she may be looking at a $8,000-$10,000 investment based on the beam size, and mechanical items she’d need to relocated inside the walls.
She would also like to open up the wall between her kitchen and dining and do a passthrough. This wouldn’t be difficult at all. In the very low chance that this is load bearing, it would be a simple header above and may require some minor reinforcement below.
The last part of her question was should she do banquette seating with her dining room table. Again, I know that this is very specific to her home, but let’s take a look. By leaving the wall between her kitchen and dining and just doing a passthrough, it would definitely make it feel more open. To move the dining table to favor a side of the room, would leave the other half of the dining room feeling empty. She’d have to fill that space with a nice sideboard or hutch furniture piece so it felt intentional. I, personally think she’d be trading one tight feeling for another. After just opening up the main wall, she gained space, but by hugging the table to a wall with a banquette, I think it would make it feel tight again. I would leave the dining room table as is.