Hello all,
I’ve spent the last few days removing a tile floor, tile shower, and tile tub surround from a leaky bathroom, and my back hurts. The demo work got me wondering about the weight of a house… It’s odd that this question struck me while working on one small bathroom – never crossed my mind while shingling or drywalling…
Anybody care to throw a guess out there? Is there any factual information about an approximate lb per sq. ft?
The old tile is being replaced with limestone, so my aches and pains are not about to wane…
Cheers,
Brock
Replies
Someone asked this not too long ago. Try the "search" feature and I'm sure it'll bring up past discussions.
"How much does a house weigh?"
More than a hen.
Yadda yadda yadda
My house weighs a 1000 lbs per lineral foot
I moved my house three years a go ( or rather HAD my house moved) and the house mover put the weight of the house at 75,000 pounds. Mine is a 35 x35 full two story with lath and plaster walls. With the hydraulic jacking system he had he could tell within a couple of pounds how much weight was on each jack. Had this huge control panel with all these guages. He could level the house within a 1/4 inch just by watching the guages. Pretty awesome.
How many significant figures are we talking about here? Are you sure it wasn't 74,553.96 pounds or was it 74,554.25 lbs? Wait, wait, I think I've got it written down here somewhere. Come back again when I've found that scrape of note paper in hand.
hee hee hee =)
In a recent seismic retrofit article in JLC, the author states that on average a single story house weighs 50 lb/sf and a two story house weighs 80 lb/sf. His website (where he repeats this claim - under the shear formula) is here:
http://www.bayarearetrofit.com/RetrofitDesign/RetrofitEngineering/retrofitengineering.html#
That rule of thumb needs a whole lot of qualifiers. Like maybe it applies to the weight from the mudsills up for crawl space construction. Single story slab on grade would be a lot less from the sills up, and a lot more if you count the slab.
-- J.S.
OK, but doesn't every generalization, especially about houses, need lots of qualifiers? I agree that you wouldn't want to make any major decisions about a house based on this estimate alone, but for a guy doing some tiling in his bathroom wondering how much his house weighs, don't you think this gives him a good estimate?
I've occasionally done the calcs to find the weight of a building. It's no that hard if you break it down into manageagle pieces, and realize that some of your "data" will be assumptions.
Brings a story to mind.......When I first started out in homebuilding, I had a similar question. My boss's reply was, "If it doesn't have to fly or float, why would you care?".
It's probably good enough for general curiosity. But I'd kinda worry about doing engineering based on it.
Doing the math on the guy who had a house moved, his works out to a little over 60 psf, well under the 80 psf from the rule of thumb. A while back, I did the math on my two story. If I'm remembering the numbers correctly, it would be 94 psf. If I have that right, it would be a mistake to do the earthquake work based on 80. 80 might be OK for the initial conjecture phase, but would you want to give a customer a firm price based on numbers that are 18% short?
-- J.S.
An old sailing crewmate was having his old Heritage Hill mansion restored to more or less original condition. His archy estimated the house, don't recall the SF (other than there being a lot of them) but I do recall something about unusually thick brick walls, to be in the neighborhood of 5 million pounds.
did
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