Marriage Wall Question

[remodelgirl]

Hi Everyone I am new to the forum! We live in a 1997 Dutch 26 x 76 (28x80). We ordered the home new. Now we have the renovation bug and we are finally replacing the papered sheetrock (thin) with new 1/2 inch drywall. We already completed the master bedroom and we love the look, waiting to take the crown molding from the living area and move to bedroom to save money and have a nicer crown in our living area. We are changing out all the wood look trim and doors to white. This has been quite an experience, we are by far experienced DIYers but we are managing.

Now we are to the living, dining and kitchen area. We would like to either put a pass through between our kitchen and dining or build some 2 foot walls on the side and open up about a 6-8 foot open between the two rooms. We are worried about the load bearing wall. Do you think we can do this I am attaching the floor plan. The wall is the center wall between dining and kitchen. We are not going all the way to the top maybe about as high as our doors or a little higher this is a 9 foot wall. Also we will leave probably 2 feet of wall on the one side and build another 2 foot wall on the other side.

Thank you for your help.

[Greg]

Hi & welcome. Yes it can be done, but you do need to remember that it is a load bearing wall. I think I would contact the manufacturer (since they should have the original prints) and see if they can give any advice. Some will work with you others don't.

At the least you are going to have to frame the openings as you would on an outside wall with double or triple headers and jams to support the weight.

Greg

[ponch37300]

Welcome to the forum!

It looks like there already is a small walk threw between them, you just want to make this bigger? Like Greg mentioned you can do it but it is an important load bearing wall so there will need to be some thought and engineering involved to do it right.

When working with load bearing walls you have to think about how the weight is transferred from the roof all the way down to the ground. When removing a section of wall you will have to carry the weight of the roof over to supports going down to the floor. To do this you use a header. This will be a double or triple 2x, the other dimension will depend on the span. Everything that sits on this header, mainly the trusses, will have it's weight carried over to the ends of the header. Then you support the header on the sides with 2x material running down to the floor. This also will depend on the weight and span as to how many or how they are oriented. Then the floor joists and subfloor need to be up to the task of holding all this weight up. For example you can't just run a couple 2x4s down to the subfloor and hope they don't crush threw the 3/4" ply or particle board. That weight needs to be transferred over to the floor trusses and then down to the ground.

The job itself isn't that bad. But if you aren't positive on what you need to do with the weight transfer you will need to get an engineer involved. This is one area you don't want to "wing" it and hope it holds.

[remodelgirl]

Thank You for your help and reply!

We tore out the wall board to see how things looked inside. Wow not built very good at all. Just wanted to show you a pics. I will call the company in the morning.

[Greg]

I am going to assume you are down south. Those look like either 2x2 or 2x4 studs. There is no way they would stand up to 3' of snow on the roof like we get up here.

From looking at it, there should be no problem opening things up.

Greg

[remodelgirl]

Actually we live in ND, average snow fall per year is 8-10 ft, we do not get a lot of snow build up. But this is really crazy right, funny thing is we have a 20 ft opening right on the other side of the little kick wall. We are going to reinforce this wall by making our own headers and placing some actual 2x6 on the wall. We were going to open the wall but there is one electrical box running under the floor and we don't like to mess with any of that so we are going to build around it.

Good side is the insulation, walls, and floors look really good. and little settling if any. We did good with our ground setup!