- Hi, Caleb with Dansie Design Build here, and today I wanted to
talk to you a little bit about basement walls and existing walls, particularly the load-bearing
walls in your basement. So we are here in a
basement in Herriman, Utah, and we are looking at
the load-bearing walls. So this would be helpful for you if you are considering opening
up your basement space, removing an existing framed
wall that's in your basement to get an idea of if
that's load bearing or not. So this will give you a really idea of how to tell which of
the walls are load bearing and which ones are not in your basement, so let's just jump right in. So the first thing that
we're going to be looking at is the floor joists. Now, these are the floor joists up there. They typically run from
the front of the home to the back of the home. And so they're these ones here. That is because they are going to want to install those the short span. So typically, and this house is that way, it's more shallow from
the street to the backyard than it is from the left side
of the lot to the right side. So these joists are spanning a shorter distance, essentially. Now, in order to get them
to span all the way across, sometimes, which is most
of the time, actually, you're going to need a
load-bearing wall in the middle or near the middle of the house to help those long joists be supported
somewhere in the middle. So this is an existing wall, and one way you can tell this
one is indeed load bearing, one way, there's a few ways you can tell, but the first one is these
little supports here. Those are stiffeners that help the wall actually hold considerably more weight for the size of the
lumber, which, this is 2x4. That's one way you can
tell if it's load bearing. The other way is that it's
in the middle of the home, like we were just talking about, and then the third way you can tell is, in any door opening, like this one here, there is a header at the top, and what you can tell about this header is that these joists obviously are going from the front of the home all
the way through to the back, but this weight where the
load is being transferred goes into this big header and
then over to the side and down this stud right here to the left of the door, and also another one to the right. You can see the same thing going on there. So the weight of these
two here particularly is coming in here and then out and down. So this wall is absolutely load bearing. The other thing, there
was another wall here which could be tricky to
tell whether or not it is because it's also a 2x6
wall, which seems like, I mean, it is definitely a lot stronger, and so you're wondering maybe, "Well, why did they use a 2x4 wall to be the load-bearing one and the 2x6 to be the
non-load-bearing one?" So you can tell that this
one is not load bearing because it does not
have that header up here and then that this one next to it definitely does have the header, so this one is intended to
be the load-bearing wall and this one is intended not to be. This is just a partition wall. So what actually happened here is that there was extra lumber from the original construction, and it just so happened to be 2x6, so that was what got used
down in the basement, and that's totally great. It's awesome, actually. But yeah, this one is not
a load-bearing wall here. So those are some ways
that you can identify some load-bearing walls in your basement and if you're trying to get those moved. The other thing I wanted
to talk about was over here and what it actually looks
like to have a beam installed instead of a load-bearing wall. So this is a... Over here, the same thing's
going on here with our joists. They're spanning from this beam here across the top of that beam
and over to the next one. Now, this is not as great
of a span distance here as was in the other room, but it is, with what's above it, we do
need to have a beam here, or a load-bearing wall, either way. But because this room is intended to have been a theater room, they wanna obviously keep this open. So all the weight from
these different joists is coming into this beam,
being transferred down here, and behind this installation mesh, you can see there is, I
mean, maybe not very well, but you can see that there is wood there holding that beam up, and
then over here as well, so we have those on each side. So that is how a beam would function the same way that a load-bearing
wall would function, so it's carrying that load
from each one of these joists out to the side on either side. So there you go, that is
how a beam would work. So if we wanted to take out a section of this load-bearing wall hypothetically, then you would wanna do the same thing. And we've pretty much already
done that with this door. You can see that the door
basically has the same idea. It's just a very short
beam going on right there. So you could lengthen that beam and make it wider and taller
so it can hold more weight, maybe use LVL instead
of dimensional lumber, and whatever that needs to
be is specific to each home and engineering that needs to happen here. But that's basically the same idea. So that's how you can tell which walls are structural
and which ones aren't. So if you need help with
your basement finish and you're in the Herriman
area or Salt Lake County in Utah County of Utah, you can reach out to us on our website, www.dansiedesignbuild.com, and we will reach right back out to you. Thanks. Have a great day.
