Hello!
I'm planning to knock down a wall in the kitchen. The kitchen is on the upper floor of a two-story house. In the neighbor's house, which has the same basic construction, the wall is gone, but there is what looks like a clad beam, about 20 cm high, near the ceiling where the wall used to be. The neighbor didn't renovate the kitchen themselves, so they don't know what's inside their "clad beam."
I expected to find a beam near the ceiling when I started tearing down the wall, but there was nothing except 2x4 studs, boards, and drywall.
There is no solid beam or even a solid stud near the ceiling. See pictures.
In the wall, there is a wide doorway. Not even above it was there a beam, only studs, and rather thick plywood (about 20 mm) instead of boards.
The boards in the wall are 20 mm thick.
Now, the question is: can such a board wall without a beam be load-bearing? The wall doesn't go through the whole house; it ends at a perpendicular interior wall.
ADDITION: Above is an attic with roof trusses. The trusses are parallel to the wall in question. No truss is directly above the wall.
I'm planning to knock down a wall in the kitchen. The kitchen is on the upper floor of a two-story house. In the neighbor's house, which has the same basic construction, the wall is gone, but there is what looks like a clad beam, about 20 cm high, near the ceiling where the wall used to be. The neighbor didn't renovate the kitchen themselves, so they don't know what's inside their "clad beam."
I expected to find a beam near the ceiling when I started tearing down the wall, but there was nothing except 2x4 studs, boards, and drywall.
There is no solid beam or even a solid stud near the ceiling. See pictures.
In the wall, there is a wide doorway. Not even above it was there a beam, only studs, and rather thick plywood (about 20 mm) instead of boards.
The boards in the wall are 20 mm thick.
Now, the question is: can such a board wall without a beam be load-bearing? The wall doesn't go through the whole house; it ends at a perpendicular interior wall.
ADDITION: Above is an attic with roof trusses. The trusses are parallel to the wall in question. No truss is directly above the wall.
There are not automatically beams in load-bearing walls. The wall bears the load, so no beam is needed. If the (previous) neighbor knew what he was doing, he replaced the wall with a beam of sufficient dimension.
A box with 20mm plywood glued and nailed on both sides is to be regarded as a beam. But here, it looks a bit shoddy with weak glue and small blocks.
It's hard to say from the information what applies, but if the next step up is the roof trusses, and they are parallel to the wall, it should not be load-bearing.
A box with 20mm plywood glued and nailed on both sides is to be regarded as a beam. But here, it looks a bit shoddy with weak glue and small blocks.
It's hard to say from the information what applies, but if the next step up is the roof trusses, and they are parallel to the wall, it should not be load-bearing.
How old the house is, blueprints, especially section drawings and floor plans (all floors), roof truss construction, and if possible, technical descriptions for the construction.
Then it should be said that if you want to be sure, you should hire a building engineer to check on-site and not rely on more or less amateurs in forums who only have pictures and blueprints to look at.
Then it should be said that if you want to be sure, you should hire a building engineer to check on-site and not rely on more or less amateurs in forums who only have pictures and blueprints to look at.
Sure, but the professionals do not answer a larger share of all questions regarding load-bearing walls in the forum. I do not know your competence, but Justus Andersson, who was a trained structural engineer (in addition to being an architect), always wanted to know the year, see drawings, etc., before he wanted to comment on load-bearing walls. But you are of course welcome to provide guarantees that it is safe to remove the wall based only on the photos available in the thread.S sturnus said:
It's completely impossible to answer without construction drawings. However, you can often make educated guesses based on other types of drawings as well. But, since your neighbor has a beam there, it's reasonable to believe that the wall is load-bearing. The beam has been put in place when the wall was removed. So, there's a beam instead of a wall. It's not something that sits in walls. Nevertheless, you still need to hire a structural engineer who can calculate what type of beam you need, how it should be supported at both ends, and how to do it so that nothing collapses during the work.