Can You Tear Down Walls in a House With Beamed Ceilings?

Ceiling Beams

• If a home's ceiling beams are for decoration only, they won’t have anything to do with whether or not you can tear out a wall. If they are part of a structural frame called post-and-beam construction, however, they will be resting upon vertical supports of similar material and form. When removing walls, you must leave load-bearing walls and structural supports in place, unless an engineer makes provisions to safely transfer the weight load to other points in the structure.

Load-Bearing Walls

• Load-bearing walls carry weight from one floor to the next. Most exterior walls are load-bearing, and they sit on foundation walls that also bear weight. If there is a second story, the load-bearing walls on that floor will sit directly above the load-bearing walls on the first floor. In a post-and-beam house, the contractor first builds a structural skeleton made from large dimensional beams and then adds the floors and the walls. If you have a post-and-beam house, the vertical beams take the place of traditional load-bearing walls.

Partition Walls

• You may remove partition walls without putting a home’s structure at risk. Partition walls are walls that do not bear weight loads. To determine if a wall is a partition wall, compare the wall configuration with the position of the walls in the floor below. If you find that there is no supporting wall directly below the wall in question, it’s probably a partition wall. While this is a general rule and holds true most of the time, an architect or engineer can design a load-bearing wall without putting a support wall beneath by installing beams in the ceiling that transfer the load to other walls. To be safe, always consult an engineer.

Considerations

• In a true post-and-beam house, you can tear out stud walls if you leave the support beams in place. If the beams are large dimensional lumber, exposing them can add a rustic or Old Country appeal to open living spaces. On the other hand, if your home has unattractive steel beams, you can conceal the beams behind new wall framing and drywall.