What is a Supporting Wall?
Jun 28th, 2008 | By admin | Category: property adviceA supporting wall is a wall which is integral to the construction of a building. If you take a supporting wall down, then structural damage to your home, or an attached home could occur. If you are thinking about changing the layout of your home, you need to be extremely cautious about making changes to the walls. A supporting wall can be taken down in most circumstances, but you must offer an alternative way to support what is above it. This could be through the use of a steel beam.
How to Identify a Supporting Wall
Here’s how to identify a supporting wall. Do not assume that supporting walls are only made of brick or stone. Even a stud partition wall could be load bearing.
If you can gain access to the blueprints for the house this can be a quick and easy way to identify supporting walls. If these are not available there are a few simple observations which will determine if the wall is supporting.
Check to see what is above the wall. If the wall is on the ground floor then what is above it? If there is another brick wall then this wall would most definitely need supporting by a steel beam or similar.
If there is nothing above the wall then you need to look down to the floorboards and see which way they run. If they run across the wall then the wall could be supporting joists (a small beam arranged parallel from wall to wall that supports a floor, ceiling, or roof) in the ground floor ceiling. In this case you will need to add extra support.
If the joists above the wall are ending then the stone or stud partition wall will be supporting the end of the run of joists. These joists will need supporting in some other way.
A dead giveaway is posts if you have a post in your house, then this will typically be supporting a ceiling.
I would highly recommend that before you start knocking down any walls you get a structural engineer to take a look. Getting professional advice could save you thousands in the long run if you need to fix a problem you could have avoided.
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