My neighbor is pondering his summer project, which among other things includes creating an opening for a patio door in the exterior wall. If his house is built like mine, and there is much to suggest it is, then from the outside in, it's wood paneling, vertical tongue-and-groove planks about 70 mm thick, air gap, horizontal tongue-and-groove planks of the same dimensions, tretex, and a whole lot of wallpaper.
In my house, it seems to be the vertical planks that are load-bearing. The horizontal ones seem to function more as insulation and to hold the vertical planks together.
I'm thinking that since it's vertical planking, the load-bearing issue is not as crucial. But what worries me is that there is already a large window next to where he plans to create the door opening. It feels a bit like that wall could become weakened.
Or what do you say, those of you with experience with old houses with this construction method?
If it's a gable wall and a normally wide door, you can probably ignore it, but it never hurts to put in a joist above.
In our house, the standing planks are skew-nailed, so when you saw into the walls you sooner or later hit a nail. This means that it holds together pretty well even with a hole in it.
In this image, you can see how they have beamed above the windows on our house.
One should check how it looks. It could be that there is a substantial beam above the planks (up near the ceiling typically and it distributes the weight so each individual plank isn't so important).
If it's near a window, one might guess there is a truss above (if they go 90° against that wall. If they run parallel with the trusses, a truss is above but with a more widespread load. But it's just a matter of either putting a substantial beam over it and screwing madly into the cut ones and the adjacent planks to have some support.
Personally, I would probably put beams both notched into the hole and on the outside + inside and then screw everything madly, maybe also placing another beam in the hole that I fasten with some sort of joist hanger to avoid toe-nailing (if there are such hangers where in a plank wall you can press a beam against the cut planks and screw into the uncut ones).
So you sleep well when the snow is on the roofs...
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