How to Identify and Remove a Load Bearing Wall | Ask This Old House

[Music] wow tommy when you said we were gonna talk load-bearing walls i was not expecting a doll house here did you build this i did i built it because i figured it's real easy to explain if you can see something this is a question you get a lot right someone wants to renovate a house they want to open up a kitchen their biggest concern is i'm going to take down the wrong wall the house is going to come yeah how do i know if it's a load very well so how do you know it's a load-bearing wall all right well it starts with the direction of the bearing joist all right what's carrying the floor let's go down into the basement so let's open up the front wall this here look at you this comes off right so now you get to look at the foundation you get to look at the carrying beam right here and the joist restaurant with lolli columns in the middle so two lolly columns and that beam is running in this direction same direction as these walls right here exactly so let's slide this over so now you can understand the relationship with everything so this direction which is perpendicular to these floor joists correct now if you've got a low bearing wall that runs down here you've got a load bearing wall here and if it's another floor there'd be a load-bearing wall here and so on down the line and they're on top of each other so it's transferring it down to the basement exactly so if the wall is perpendicular to where we see these joists it's going to be load-bearing problems bearing wall load-bearing wall load-bearing wall load-bearing wall so that means if they are parallel to these joists yeah they're not really doing us any good so they're probably not load bearing right so see that wall right there going in the front door i do all right take that wall and move it away if you notice what's happening above nothing like it all the load here is undisturbed it can hold and support all of that right now this load-bearing wall right here that's over the beam in the basement that comes all the way up and carrying the second floor what happens if we take that out so just knock it down just tip it forward right see how the floor joists sag ooh yeah okay so if i did want to take this out you take them out all the time yeah what's the proper way to take out this load-bearing wall right here all right the first thing we need to do is we've established that it's a load-bearing wall we now are going to build a temporary wall close to the structure a wall but far enough away so that we can work on the structural wall and remove it and obviously something that we would build when the ceiling was still in place we could do that okay so now it's in place we can remove it and what's going to happen to our ceiling in that situation well in this case our ceiling is temporarily supported so let me just and that's not going to dip at all right okay so now that the temporary walls are in place you can remove the load-bearing wall so this comes out yep but what we have to do is we have to make up for the bearing capacity of that load-bearing wall and we're going to do that with two posts and one will go against the bearing wall here okay the other one will go on the outside against the stud right here but over the foundation and i'll put a beam in that has been sized to carry the load above so let me stick this one underneath that and with that in place can we take our temporary walls out take the temporary walls out this guy comes out our floor above has never left us it's still there and now if we were to push down on this it's going nowhere and as i look into this room it's a big wide clear span but i do see the beam hanging down so i got to live with that header there right now let's say i want a wide open space but i don't want a beam okay we would take that beam and we would position it in a different location i'll take this out take that out take that poster because we're going to position it differently here's the outside post and an inside post again these are over the bearing beam down in the basement and in this case this one goes the full length all the way to this top plate here right because it's now going to support the end of the beam that is recessed into the joist system and again so as i look at this one i've got a clear span through the entire room but now i don't have any drop beam i've got a flat plane for that entire ceiling right nice and flush on the bottom it's carrying the load the engineer has designed the space and so on down the line so instead of the joists sitting on top of the beam they are now hanging off of the side so you've actually cut these away and tucked this in the middle right and they're on mechanical fasteners metal timber hangers look at that so exactly what we want load-bearing walls away and you can't see anything in the ceiling exactly super instructive tommy in terms of figuring out how to identify a load-bearing wall and how to get rid of them nice job thank you thanks for watching this 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Channel: This Old House

Views: 662,500

Keywords: This Old House, DIY, Construction, Home Improvement, Ask This Old House, Building, Tom Silva, walls

Id: y6YVBy-1hjQ

Length: 4min 58sec (298 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021