Remove Walls On First Floor Of Two Story Home

Rewiring electrical of a two story home.

Remove walls on first floor of two story home. Interior walls create privacy define spaces and sometimes bear the weight of the level above. Namely how do you rewire lights and fans on the ceiling of the first floor of a two story home. This wall breaks up the span of the second floor joists. I want to replace the wall with a flush beam.

Owners of older homes often want to have a more open floor plan so they remove walls to get the more open look. Go into your basement or crawlspace and look at the alignment of floor joists. Part one of this series on rewiring electrical of a two story home begins with an obvious issue. New construction began to favor the great room look in which kitchen dining and living spaces were.

In this story we ll show you how to remove nearly any wall and tell you how to add a structural beam if it s needed. These interior walls have defined floor plans for centuries but starting in the 1950s when the open floor plan style became popular many of these walls segmenting the house fell into disfavor. When you replace a load bearing wall with a load bearing beam you create a larger more useful floor area and give your home a feeling of spaciousness. While first floor supports are needed to account for the additional weight of a second floor the walls are pretty much the same as those of a single story home.

Heating plumbing and electrical lines will have to be rerouted. I am working on removing a load bearing wall in the first floor of a 2 story house. Cost to remove a load bearing wall. And sometimes moving those lines is a huge task so difficult that removing the wall just isn t practical.

The walls that are perpendicular to the rafters and connected to them will be load bearing. Professional contractors will normally check first to see if a wall is load bearing before they remove it. First determine if the wall you want to remove is a load bearing wall meaning it supports the floor above. It s my understanding that a double 2x12 will carry the load then properly supported in the crawl space below across the 12 span.

This article won t be comprehensive enough for you to do the entire job on your own. Let s say you have a vaulted room for example. It may be scary to think about tearing walls out of your house but don. These are large pieces of lumber going across the house from side to side supporting the floor roof and are generally 16 apart.

Figure a shows the most common things found inside a wall. A main drain running through the wall from a second floor bathroom could be very difficult and expensive to reroute. In the process they remove a load bearing wall and don t realize that it is a load bearing wall.