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Can I open up a wall?  And other questions about your structure!

14 min read If you’ve ever wished to just open up a wall in your house but worried it would be too expensive, too difficult or downright risky, I hope you’ll feel less so at the end of this episode!

If you’ve ever wished to just open up a wall in your house but worried it would be too expensive, too difficult or downright risky, I hope you’ll feel less so at the end of this episode!

True, there are some areas of your house structure you don’t want to carelessly change – for fear of bringing down the whole thing!  

You sure do need to know where your bearing walls are and what they are.  But once you know where your home’s structure is … and isn’t … you’ll be better able to “see through the walls” and open up some great flow in your home!  

Tune in for some rules of thumb for identifying structure AND some easy design cheats to open up space in the structure you have without costly re-engineering!  

The great news is that with a few adjustments to the structure of a mid-century home you can turn an “well, ok” house into a “wow” house!

You can do more than open up a wall by the way! Mid-century houses with simple rafter framed roofs (instead of truss systems) can allow you to open up the ceiling as well! Check out how that happened in these projects!!

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Resources to Help You Open up a Wall

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

We’ve been talking so much over the last couple of episodes about how layout changes can help you create openness inside your mid-century home and connectedness to the outside. But sometimes it can seem impossible to consider removing something as solid as an existing wall of your house. If you know a little bit more about what’s going on inside your home’s structure – so you can open up a wall – you’ll be more comfortable thinking about how you can change them. Let’s do that today. Hey there! Welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to season nine, episode six.

Before we get started, I just wanted to shout out to everyone that came to the amazing design clinic on Saturday. I hope we’ll catch you for the next one. We had an amazing two and a half hours devoted to planning well-designed porches, patios, and decks for mid-century homes. I swear to God, I always try to keep them to two, but this time it only ran long because of questions. So that’s gotta be a good thing!

If you missed it and you’re sorry you didn’t have an opportunity to go through the workshop, you can! As part of the bonus content of the Ready to Remodel program (kicking off again, this fall). If you’re new to the podcast, ready to remodel is my homeowner design program. It comes with lessons, exercises, and easy to follow workbooks that lets you go through the steps of the master plan method applied to your home at your own pace. And it’s paired with three months of weekly office hours calls where you can check in with your fellow home remodelers for accountability and ask me any questions that are coming up for you during your design process.

I’ve added bonus content that covers all the other elements that tend to come up for people planning a potentially stressful mid-century home update. A workshop on how to sneak in time to plan into your otherwise busy life. One on planning and budgeting for a reasonable home remodel. Extra design content on all of the common spaces that need updating in a mid-century house, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and more. Plus topical, detailed workshops on mid-century spaces like kitchens and the patio, deck, and porch workshop we just completed are available inside the portal. Plus, we do a live workshop during each cohort where homeowners come to me with their most challenging mental block areas and we brainstorm design solutions for them in real time.

That’s always one of my favorite parts of the program. We are going to be opening a new cohort of ready to remodel again this fall. So if you’re curious about how that might make your home improvement plans go so much more smoothly, go to my wait list, mod-midwest.com/waitlist to be the first to hear about how you can join us to plan a mid-century remodel that will improve your life, fit your budget and transform your home to fit your version of mid-century style.

The resource of the week this week, isn’t a free PDF for me. It’s something you already have yourself, but might not know about. I want you to take advantage of the expertise of your local building department plan encounter. When you plan to make any substantial changes to your home, you need to get permission and approval from your local building department. Many people view this as a burden and a stress. “Oh no!The building code is out to get me.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The building code is our friend and every clause exists because something went wrong in the past and people who care are trying to prevent it from happening again. We’re required to have two means of egress from a basement bedroom so people don’t die in a fire. We’re required to have certain types of railings with a certain height and a certain density of structure around a deck, so people don’t fall off the edge and break their arms and legs. We’re required to have properly inspected plumbing systems so that sewage doesn’t back up into the basement. These are all great things. I’m sure you can agree.

But there’s more! If you are DIYing your home improvement plans, the planning department is an invaluable resource to not just help you make sure that you’re planning a safe and legal process while you’re doing it.

But to set you on the right track during your planning, there is an office somewhere in your city or county staffed by people whose job it is to make sure that all the houses and buildings in your area are constructed properly. And most of the time, if you catch them on a good day, those same people will be happy to discuss your hopes and plans for your house with you. Once you start to have an idea of where you’re going in your plans, how you want to open up a wall, for example, you can go down to the permit desk of your local building office and ask them what they think about your plan.

Take some concrete information about your house, a sketch, a couple of photos on your phone and visit the planning office to show them what you’ve got in mind. The odds are pretty good that they will let you know what’s all right, or make suggestions about what you need to adjust the appropriate insulation, the right structure, subcontractors, et cetera. They’ll tell you what inspection visits will be necessary for your project and what permanent information you need to give back to them in order to get it approved. Obviously these hardworking public officials can’t design your remodel for you, but they can absolutely weigh in on whether what you’ve got in mind is safe and correct. Don’t forget to ask for their help. All right, before we dig into the show, you’ll find the show notes with links to any references I make and a transcript of the conversation on my website, at midmod-midwest.com/906.

Many of my clients and the homeowners I talk to on Facebook and Instagram and in my consultation calls worry that moving structure is too important to attempt without a design expert. Today’s episode is for you. If you’re one of those folks, if you’re afraid to put a hole in your wall, then I hope you’ll feel less so at the end of this chat. I’m gonna start today with a silly story. When my little sister was in medical school, we lived in an apartment in Chicago together. I would sometimes tag along when she went out with friends who were blowing off steam from their med school stress.

One night, one of them asked me jokingly for my design expertise. What bit of the building we were standing in? Could they go after with a hammer and take out to knock down the entire structure? Now, typically there isn’t one single answer to that question. Buildings are pretty composite. But we were standing in a remodeled house that had a single central column holding up most of the floor above. My sister’s inebriated friend was kidding, but you might want to know the reverse. What elements of structure should you not remove? If your goal is to not knock down your entire home, you need to know where your bearing walls and elements are.

There are some walls in your house that are just separating one space for another. But if you live in a typical builder-grade ranch, there are other walls that hold up the roof or at least the attic rafters. You don’t want to mess with those and you shouldn’t go knocking out walls in your house, willy nilly. Now, if you’re planning a large enough scale and cost of a remodel, an extensive enough plan, you can do almost anything to the structure of your house. A talented designer or engineer can help you rebuild the house from the ground up, double it and scale open up a wall with new load bearing elements and utterly transform the look and feel of your home. In my work with mid-century master plan clients, we sometimes propose dramatic shifts and structure, but you don’t have to go that far to make dramatically visible changes in your home.

Opening up view lines within a too small house is incredibly powerful as we’ve been chatting about in the last couple of episodes. And you can do that with subtle tweaks to your existing structure or by working within it. Your first step towards confidence here is to know some basic terminology of houses.

This may all be familiar to you, but if it’s not you’ll want o know what a bearing wall is. Likewise, a stud, a post, a foundation, a joist, and a rafter. Think about having x-ray vision for your house. It can help to go and look at new homes under construction to see what the structure of houses look like. But that will only take you so far. The way houses were constructed in the mid-century is a little different from the way they’re built today. In a mid-century ranch house, you can pretty much count on the fact that your roof is being held up by three lines of structure, two outside bearing walls and a central spine for your house.

So how do you figure out which are the bearing walls? Well, if you poke your head up into your attic, you’ll see that your mid-century house is likely framed around a series of triangles in the roof. These triangles of rafters repeat over and over and over again, along the length of the house. The outer corners of those triangles are sitting on two walls at the outside of the house. Those are your bearing walls. Your walls are made up of studs. Two by fours, spaced 16 inches apart from center to center, any place in a bearing wall that there’s an opening wider than that. A header, a small horizontal beam, spans over that opening, catches the weight coming down from above and brings it back down to the ground through studs on either side of the opening. Now, if your house has been added onto over the years into an L, a C, an S or a Z shape, you may have multiple lines of structure. But in a simple mid-century ranch, you’ve just got one line supported at the two outer walls and with a central line of structure.

Now where’s that you can check in three places for clues. You can go outside and look at the roof. Bearing walls are the outside walls where the roof Gable ends come down and the center spine is probably centered under the peak of the roof. Or you can go in your basement and look for columns or the beam that supports the joist running perpendicular to your structure. The central bearing wall of your house above is sitting on top of those columns in the basement. Now, at the end of the day, you want to get help before you change your structure. Get a building inspection, get a consult from a contractor, draw plans and take them to the building department, call an architect or an engineer. But these things I’m talking about with you today will help you better understand what the experts will say to you and keep you going in the direction of asking the right questions.

Once you know where your bearing walls are, realize that you can open up your nonbearing walls as much as you want. And again, this comes back to last week’s discussion of the benefits or problems of an open plan. If you were to remove a nonbearing wall between a living room and a bedroom, there’s no structural problem with that, but then you don’t really have a living room and a bedroom anymore. So you probably don’t want to do that. But you can think open up a wall between the social parts of your house anytime they’re nonbearing with almost no structural consequences whatsoever. Don’t be afraid to make changes to the bearing walls of your house, either. If you need to make an opening in the structure, you’ll just need the appropriately sized header to carry the load from the roof all the way down to the ground again. But here are some cheats you can use to open up space without even really needing to change a structure.

You can put a door anywhere there’s a window. A Window already has a header and is already carrying weight down to the ground. There isn’t structure below your window, holding up anything more on the house than the window itself. So if you have a window opening anywhere in the bearing walls of your house, you can take that window out and replace it with a window that runs all the way down to the floor or with a door with literally no structural consequences. Now, if you want to put in a window or a door wider than the current opening, you will have to affect the structure. And this is where you want to consult an expert. You can also turn a bearing wall into a colonnade rather than a fully open plan structure. You can have view lines that go through a wall. You might fill in that colonnade with shelving. A great mid-century solution for a partially open layout.

If you do want to create a wide headered opening between two rooms to fully blow out the wall between your kitchen and dining room. For example, one thing that often comes up is that the wider, the span of an opening is the taller, the deeper a header needs to be, which means that it can sometimes intrude back down into the room. You can make for a less obtrusive header by shortening the overall whip, adding in a few columns set in from the walls. Now, remember, we’re not talking about symmetry here. You’re not trying to frame this opening evenly. So ideally you’ll have a set of multiple columns for interest – three on one side, one on the other, for example – or you’ll off-center the opening with columns along one end, and then a wider opening for a door space at the other. You get the view connection through without having to fully header off the entire opening. And remember, you can always pull out non-structural walls.

Another thing you can do is open up a wall without changing structure. I was recently having a consultation call with a ready to remodel student who’s considering making openings in the central bearing of her wall of her house because she’s got a beautiful sunny living room facing south and a dark kitchen facing north that never gets any of the natural light. We also talked about how she can bring light into that kitchen space with skylights, but we were talking about how beneficial it would be to bring in light from multiple angles in the room and to borrow some of that warm, glowing winter light she gets in the afternoons in her living room. What she didn’t want though, was to have a big view from her living room into the kitchen.

She likes to have the ability to leave the clutter of the kitchen be and keep the living room a little more formal and pretty. She also found that there was a noticeable temperature difference between the sunny room and the shady room in winter days. She wanted to borrow some of that warmth without having to blow fans through the one doorway between the two spaces.

We brainstormed the solution of simply removing the dry wall, but not the studs of the central spine wall, and then framing little high windows, a line of clerestory, that would create openings between the kitchen and the living room above eye height letting light bounce through and warmth flow. We wouldn’t be touching structure at all so it wouldn’t require any necessary new header work and be much more simple to effect than framing in a series of new window openings that were wider than 16 inches on center. If you were looking for a solution that did give you view connections through the house, you could cut longer vertical openings between studs again, not affecting your structure in the slightest, but giving you peak-a-boo views from one space to another.

Remember you do need to watch out for other things that are happening inside of your walls and structure. There may be electrical wiring happening in there, so do your demolition carefully when you’re planning to make that kind of opening. Knowing a little more about the structure of your house can be incredibly valuable when you start to think about what’s possible when you’re making interesting changes.

And the relatively straightforward structure of mid-century houses gives us so many possibilities to make changes. Houses like ours are easier to add onto and easier to modify on the inside than many older homes and newer ones, ironically. For example, the rafter structure in most early mid-century houses, instead of the trusses found in modern roofs – which are easier for contractors to install, but harder to modify after the fact – means that we have a unique ability to elevate the ceilings in our main floor spaces.

One design solution I often set up for homeowners hoping to expand the feeling of a snug living room is to elevate the ceiling slightly. I’ll put a sketch of what this looks like on the blog post for this episode. So check out the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/906 for the example. The bottom line though, is that knowing more about the structure of your house will empower you to think about changes you can make to it, knowing where your bearing walls are and aren’t will help you think about where you can open things up and where it’ll be more complicated, too.

You can make cost effective choices for your home and you can shift the layout in very useful ways if you’re willing to think a little bit more creatively about what’s happening inside and between your walls. This is just one component of this discovery phase of the master plan process.

The goal of the entire discovery process is to make you the confident expert in your own home. And you won’t become an expert simply by wishing it. You’ll need to read web articles, poke around in your foundation, read your inspection report from cover to cover, call up an expert and ask them for opinions. But once you start to ask these questions, you’ll become more and more confident about the details of your home. And therefore you’ll open up more and more possibilities for how you can tweak and adjust it to best fit your life. I hope I’ve given you a few ideas about how you can create new openings in your home without affecting your structure at all, or by shifting the structure in minor ways.

Again, remember, don’t go changing anything about the structure of your house without consulting an expert. You don’t want to follow the advice of my sister’s inebriated friend and knock down an entire building by removing one column.But I hope you do feel inspired to make some transformative changes to your home by adjusting the way it is open or closed within itself.

If you wanna know more about the discovery process and how it can empower you to transform your home or the entire master plan method, then I recommend you check out episode one from season six. That explains how I came up with a master plan method for working with my clients and why it’s so essential. You can read about the master plan method by grabbing the free guide to the system, at midmod-midwest.com/roadmap, which will let you create a roadmap for your entire remodel.

Coincidentally, that’s all for today. Tune in next week for a discussion of where you can go to find people that share your vision for your mid-century house, to reinforce your goals and to help keep you on track as you plan a mid-century house that doesn’t just fit your life, but fits the house you have. The house you chose because you love it. I never want you to be talked into a choice you don’t love for your home that removes its mid-century character. So we’ll be talking next week about where you can go to find people that will help reinforce and encourage you on your quest to make your mid-century home your own, and the very best mid-century house that it can be. See you next week.

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