They Supported The Weight Of The Roof And The Walls

This house uses trusses for the roof framing.

They supported the weight of the roof and the walls.

The alternative is to build up the roof s frame with 2x8s and 2x10s. See if you have a hole in it where you can see if it is a double top plate. Not all external walls are always load bearing. Framing in construction is the fitting together of pieces to give a structure support and shape.

Posts in the basement or crawlspace can indicate supporting walls up above. Trusses are quite common these days because they have five big advantages from the builder s standpoint. Trusses are pre fabricated triangulated wooden structures used to support the roof. The spacing and allowable span of ceiling joists in residential construction is standardized according to building codes which cover not only basic wall to wall room design but nonparallel.

If so it is probably load bearing. Go up in the attic and find where the wall you want to remove hits the ceiling. Some houses are designed so that only some of the outside walls support the roof weight. They should be designed to span the whole width but they also could have been engineered to have a load bearing wall.

Framing materials are usually wood engineered wood or structural steel the alternative to framed construction is generally called mass wall construction where horizontal layers of stacked materials such as log building masonry rammed earth adobe etc. For example a gable end truss may be designed with support members that transmit the roof weight load outward to the side walls allowing the end wall directly below it to have breaks or openings in it that would otherwise be impossible. When in doubt about whether a wall is supporting treat it as if it is.