Flat Roof Load Bearing Wall

In this roof design the exterior walls on which the roof s sloping rafters rest are load bearing walls.

Flat roof load bearing wall.

A gable roof is a roof that slopes downward from a central ridge to a building s exterior walls on two sides. Using this technique you ll get a better idea of the location of the load bearing walls in your house. On the other two sides the roof terminates in a flat triangular gable. Excluding the ends i thought three should be enough.

Load bearing walls cross roof beams in a perpendicular direction. Often these load bearing walls are roughly near the center of the house because the center of the house is the farthest point from any of the exterior walls. Rafter spans can be extended slightly beyond what the rafter tables suggest when there is a cantelever extending beyond the supporting wall. You need to substitute the load bearing wall with a different supporting structure.

Load bearing walls support the weight of a floor or roof structure above and are so named because they bear a load. Calculating the load on a flat roof is a challenging task for the layperson that involves knowledge of building materials their weights and local building codes. Ceiling joist span use this table to determine the maximum lengths of ceiling joists based on species of lumber joist spacing and joist size. I ve torn away some of the dry wall on the inside and there s a beam about 3 1 2 by 6 in place running across the 22 length of the room.

The roof trusses are too long to span the whole house so the load bearing wall runs down the center of the house to support the trusses at the perpendicular intersection in the middle. There s a good chance this wall is load bearing especially if it runs parallel to a central basement support beam. The standard guide in the u s the asce 7 05 lists weights and stresses for all building materials expressed in pounds per square foot. Look for an internal wall that s near the relative center of your house.

Although they don t bear the full weight load of the roof the gable end walls are also typically load bearing and an interior wall running parallel to the roof ridge in the center of the building often bears. If a wall is located on the ground floor go down to the basement to observe the ceiling beams. Load bearing walls typically run in the same direction. But you can t stop there.

I m trying to figure out how many posts i should put in place to adequately bear the weight of the flat roof once i take out the wall. By contrast a non load bearing wall sometimes called a partition wall is responsible only for holding up itself. 2 look inside the attic if possible to identify the direction in which the rafters or joists travel.