We are facing various renovations and are planning, among other things, to
- take down the wall between the kitchen and living room
- move the patio door a notch to the left (replacing the window) and install a full window where the door is today
The house is a single-story villa of about 120 sqm with an attic.
We are wondering if we need to contact a structural engineer, or if it's obvious what can/cannot be done.
I have attached the documents that I believe may be useful.
Exterior walls are normally load-bearing with headers above windows and doors. It has also occurred that vertical frames/studs between the windows have been load-bearing for the header.
Normally, there are no load-bearing interior walls when there are truss roofs, but in your case, it is an attic storage. At one point, some snow zones were changed because roofs started to collapse under heavy snow load. It is therefore possible that the trusses are undersized.
I recommend that a structural engineer take a look at the house.
Exterior walls are normally load-bearing with lintels above windows and doors. It has also occurred that vertical frames/studs between the windows have been load-bearing for the lintel.
Normally there are no load-bearing interior walls when there are truss rafters, but in your case, it is a storage attic. At one point, some snow zones were changed because roofs started collapsing under high snow loads. It is therefore the case that rafters may be under-dimensioned.
I recommend that a structural engineer take a look at the house.
It is perfectly fine to move the door to the window opening since the wall is already supported above the window. It's only if you extend beyond the width of the existing window that you'd need to take any new measures to support the wall. Here's a guide that can help with the sizing https://www.byggbeskrivningar.se/dimensionering/med-meny/?cid=187
As for tearing down the interior wall, it depends on whether the trusses are self-supporting or not. Often, truss constructions are self-supporting, but it's still quite common for them to need support in the middle. Therefore, the interior wall you want to demolish could be a load-bearing wall. I just skimmed through the documents you sent, so I might have missed if it's specified somewhere that the trusses are self-supporting.
It's free to move the door to the window opening since the wall is already supported above the window.
Or the support depends on the standing frames around existing windows and new windows do not have frames that can be load-bearing. It was apparently common in the outer walls of the 50s and 60s with 3 windows and a door close to each other to maintain a thin wall.
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Janus82 said: