Load Bearing Wall Sketch

LOAD BEARING WALL SKETCH

Site Survey

1 | FLAT ROOFS

WHAT WE NEED

FLAT ROOF STRUCTURAL MEASUREMENTS

2 | LOAD BEARING WALL SKETCH - WALK THROUGH

RENDERING THE DRAWING

DETERMINING WHICH WALLS ARE LOAD BEARING

3 | QUIZ

1 | FLAT ROOFS

WHAT WE NEED

When completing a Load Bearing Wall Sketch for flat roof types, your drawing should represent the following:

The home should be drawn approximately to scale.
1. Use grid paper to make your life easier.
Represent all exterior load bearing walls (every wall around the perimeter of the house is a load bearing wall.)
Draw all the interior walls of the home and represent the interior measurements of each room.
Represent the rafter direction for each roof space.

FLAT ROOF STRUCTURAL MEASUREMENTS

Completing the Load Bearing Wall Sketch is important of course, but just as important is completing a proper framing analysis. Most flat roofs will have a similar surveying process as a vaulted conventional roof:

You will need to use an alternative method of measuring either via a Poke Hole and stud finder test
1. You will need to use a stud finder to get the spacing of the rafters.
2. This will also help you determine the direction of the rafters for your Load Bearing Wall Sketch.
Pull light fixture. Can Light
Pull Soffit or check for open framing on the side
Pull Turle Vent
If all of these are completed, the last thing would be a dry wall cut which to repair we would need a tech.

2 | LOAD BEARING WALL SKETCH - WALK THROUGH

RENDERING THE DRAWING

gather all of your exterior measurements of the home in order to draw the perimeter of the home and exterior load bearing walls:
- Make sure to use some type of reference scale and make a legend at the top.
when drawing walls, remember that most walls are framed in with 2x4s.
- If your scale is 1 grid block equals 1 foot, make a consistent judgement about how to draw the walls.
- In this example, the surveyor has chosen to round up the thickness of the wall to 1' but will indicate the correct measurements of the interior dimensions.
This surveyor has started the drawing by doing a simple outline of the perimeter and representing the basic dimensions of each roof section.

This surveyor has started the drawing by doing a simple outline of the perimeter and representing the basic dimensions of each roof section.

Next, the surveyor will draw the exterior walls.
- Remember, this surveyor has chosen to represent the walls using a unit of 1 block thickness, so they will need to be careful to indicate the correct dimensions when labeling.

Now the surveyor will draw the interior walls.

The final step is to show the rafter direction.
- This surveyor initially did the whole drawing using the same color but came back with a red pen after the fact to help differentiate the rafters from the walls.

DETERMINING WHICH WALLS ARE LOAD BEARING

Since we won't usually have the home schematics, we have to use some context clues to identify load bearing walls. Here are a few guidelines to use to identify them:

- Interior walls running parallel with the joists/rafter direction will not be load bearing.
- Interior walls running perpendicular to the joist/rafter direction are much more likely to be load bearing.
  - On a single level home, it's a little easier since there's only one wall level to worry about.
  - It becomes more complex when there is more than one level on the home, as you would need to identify common walls all the way up the home vertically and it is possible for load bearing members following the same direction to be hidden such as a beam hidden in the framing.

- In homes with attic access it may be easier to see load bearing walls from the attic by lifting some of the insulation to expose walls that meet up perpendicular with the ceiling joists.
  - Also look for context clues like fasteners and tie downs fixing joists to load bearing walls as seen to the left.

In this particular example, the walls in green are the only walls that could possibly be load bearing.

3 | QUIZ

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