Question about interior wall removal

Basically I want to open up a wall for the mother in law to have more space. I have little knowledge in construction and I'm wondering if this will be a difficult process. I posted a picture of my home's floorplan and which wall I want demolished. Does it look like it's load bearing? About how much would it cost to demo , including new carpet in both rooms? I know I should get a contractor to come give me a bid, but I don't want to waste their time if it's in the 10's of thousands of dollars. Can someone give me a ballpark based on this picture?

http://imgur.com/SdAoljD

no!!! we need more pics of the attic and is this a one story home. if it is not a load wall for all you are asking it could be as much as 25k all depends on what you want. save your self some time call some contractors and get bids if you have not done this before don't try this for your first time it could kill you!

yeah it's a one story home. I don't think I can get over to that area of the house. I climbed in the attic in the garage and I can't seem to get any further in that direction because there's an air handler in the way. $25k sounds insane for a company just to knock a wall down and re-carpet two rooms.

Welcome to the site. Any info on pricing will just be a guess at best but we can talk about the wall.
You will likely have to have someone climb into the attic and look at the roof structure to be absolutely sure.
But you have a better than good chance that it is not load bearing. If it is not load bearing, removel will be short work at the start of a day and repairs to drywall and removMay ing any electrical lines will be fairly simple too.
Maybe between $1000 & $2000 then you can add paint likely for 2 rooms and flooring, you can get prices for. Just figure out the new sq footage.

If it is load bearing, it would climb the price but you could look at a smaller opening with almost the same effect for a lot less money.

Do you have a crawl space under the house?

nealtw said:

Do you have a crawl space under the house?

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No it's Florida, we don't go underground. You dig 2 feet and you hit water.

nealtw said:

Welcome to the site. Any info on pricing will just be a guess at best but we can talk about the wall.
You will likely have to have someone climb into the attic and look at the roof structure to be absolutely sure.
But you have a better than good chance that it is not load bearing. If it is not load bearing, removel will be short work at the start of a day and repairs to drywall and removMay ing any electrical lines will be fairly simple too.
Maybe between $1000 & $2000 then you can add paint likely for 2 rooms and flooring, you can get prices for. Just figure out the new sq footage.

If it is load bearing, it would climb the price but you could look at a smaller opening with almost the same effect for a lot less money.

Click to expand...

That's about what I thought it would be. I doubt it's load bearing either, thanks!

Depending on the age of the house, you might call the designer, or the builder or if you can find the name of the truss company which might be stamped on the trusses, someone might have the records. Here sometimes we can get a copy of the plans from the city and that plan would show whats going on and they could help with that reading for a charge.

If you have loosefill insulation in the attic, someone could get inthere for a look but they will have to know where to put there feet so it is not for amateurs.

From your pic, it does not appear to be a high probability for load bearing. If you truly cannot get into the attic area due to obstructions and you are committed to the project, you can cut into the ceiling to visually check on the direction of the ceiling joists or trusses. Sure, this will cause some short term damage but so what? You are about to rip an entire wall out, so you will be doing drywall on the ceiling anyway, right? If you have ceiling joists, you have the most difficult situation to evaluate. If you have trusses, you may have a lot of flexibility because they are designed to carry loads from outside wall to outside wall.

If the top plate of your wall runs parallel to the ceiling joists or trusses, you have a partition wall .... rip it out yourself. If you can get a skilled guy in there to repair the walls and ceiling, you will be saving big money.

If the top plate is perpendicular to your ceiling joists, the wall "could" be bearing. You can support the wall with a temporary frame and open the wall wide enough to insert a header. Again, any apprentice carpenter can do this for cheap. This gives you the open feel you want for the in-law without risking structural damage to the house. And when the in-law leaves you can restore the wall and get that bedroom back!


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Partition walls like that are rarely load bearing. It's a Florida home and if it's fairly new it's going to be trusses. If the area you can see uses trusses, they will be over the bedroom also. Just looking at that design and you can see you wouldn't have a load bearing wall there. They would use trusses to span from that left wall to the right wall where the pool bath exit is. You may also be able to tell from the roof layout over it.
Figure your total square feet with the wall down and get a budget install price from HD. Then it's just demo and some patching.

Some simple things you can do to make it easier to go back and do the needed patching is using a utility knife to cut the paint and tape lines along the ceiling and wall before the demo.
Almost every DIY picture we see here on any DIY site shows where they demoed like they do on those stupid DIY shows and the drywalls papers peeled back 6" from just ripping it out.
Once the tapes cut remove all the drywall, there is no dust free, no mess way to do it.
So cover or remove anything not needed in the area.
Remove any baseboard, 1/4 round.
Beat along any outside corners and remove the metal outside corners.
Wack through the sheet rock with a hammer and start pulling it off the wall.
Fastest way to get the studs out is to wack them at the bottom sides ways then pull them out away from the wall.

You could do the whole project yourself, if you wanted to. But I would bring in a contractor or two to get prices. They will probably talk about how they would do it and they would also check for bearing load. Who knows? Maybe they will be reasonably priced. (BTW: I would do it myself)