I am working on my own house this time. Our bedroom has a cathedral ceiling that has a knee wall on one end where the slope of the roof makes the ceiling too low to stand up. My wife wants the wall moved farther into the room to make a larger closet in the space behind the knee wall.
The builder (the house is 20 years old) coped all of the roof joists where the top of the knee wall meets the joists. This indicates to me (and the structural engineer) that the wall is carrying some of the roof load. BUT… The wall runs parrallel to the floor joists and it sits directly between two floor joists (meaning to me that it is not structural)
Is there a reason why the builder would have coped each roof joist other than for structural reasons?
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I am guessin ya mean a birds mouth...he did it for nailing, and positive placement. If the rafters are bearing in the wall only, you can bet it's structural.
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Just leave the small kneewall there, and build another in front. That way, the existing will continue to happily function as it always has without destabilixing anything and the new face will make the wife happy. old wall becomes back wall of the closet.
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what is "coped" and what are "roof joists"?
If there is a structural engineer involved, why are you second-guessing him? I'm not sure I get it. Piffin's solution makes the most sense, I think your engineer would tell you to be careful not to attach your new front wall to the rafters in such a way as to transfer the load where you might not want it. Follow your load transfer and see where it leads. Is this a heavy roof (i.e. tile) or comp. shingles?
THe structural engineer thought that it was load bearing because the roof joists (his word, I have always called them rafters) are "coped" (again his word, I would have just called them notched) where the wall meets the ceiling. When he came to his comclusion when made the assumptiong that their was a beam in the ceiling below this room. I cut the drywall to expose the ceiling and the knee wall above is sitting just on the floor witout any support below it. My experince tells me that this cannot then be a load bearing wall. I have not yet talked to him about the lack of any support under the wall. I just thought that the framers out there (I am an electrician) might have an explanation as to why the wall was built like it was if it is not load bearing.
I want to remove the old wall or else my closet will only be two feet wide. If I remove the wall I will have a 5 1/2 by 12 foot closet.
A few comments...Since your rafters are birdsmouthed it might be more trouble than it's worth to demo out the old kneewall. If it's not bearing (and it sure sounds like it isn't....and that you know more than the engineer you've been quoting), then perhaps you could, as another poster suggested, build a new wall in front of the old one, but also build in some drawer units into the old kneewall....or even skip the new wall altogether & design lots of built-in drawers into the old knee-wall....get lots of storage without losing space in the room....
Ahh, I see. So if the rafters bear on this wall, and it has no support below, my vote would be for removing it. It sounds like it should never have been built that way to begin with (I've seen it done that way, and I always cringe at the sight of a pony wall to the roof sitting in the middle of a joist span). The question in my mind is, How deep are the seat-cuts? In other words, is the integrity of the rafters compromised significantly? Might you replace the wall with a beam, with bearing posts at either end? (might not be an issue if your new wall will be load-bearing, significantly lessening the effective span of the notched rafters.) And my other question is, Can you add structural support below your new wall? If so, I would definitely do so.
A normal closet is only two feet deep. Go deeper and you will never use the back anyway. Not in a sloping one like this.What mean you that the kneewall is only sitting on th efloor? there are no joists under it? That is unreasonable. The floor joists normally run perpendicular to rafters and kneewals. With a notched rafter sittin on a kneewall that is lieing across floor joists, those joists are indeed taking some of the roof load.By changing the location of the wall, you change the amt of load the kneewall takes ( for better or worsse) and you transfer that load to a different location on the floor joists ( in most cases, for the worse)
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You'd better get a different engineer if he doesn't even know what framing members are called. There are local differences in nomenclature but not in engineering. You have someone who doesn't know what they are talking about, therefore the information you are passing on is not clear.Beat it to fit / Paint it to match
Not necessarily. He may just be from the Old School, in the days (before rafters) when carpenters had to make their seat-cuts in the roof joists by hand, using a coping saw.
Sounds like he has the same house that I've got. This is a storey and a half with a hip roof on all four sides and a bunch of dormers to provide some ceiling height along the centreline. The area between dormers has knee walls: the ones running parallel to the joists are within the heated envelope and are used for closets, and the ones running across the joists are insulated and the space behind them vented to form unconditioned attic space.
to the original poster: The knee walls running parallel to the joists are non-structural, but sometimes they birds-mouth cut the rafters at this closet knee-wall anyway to make it easier to nail off. You're right that this may have compromised the strength of the rafters, bearing roof load to the floor in a way which is not structurally sound. If you want to remove that wall, you may need to splice the rafters to strengthen the area weakened by the birds-mouth. Your engineer can probably recommend something, like plywood plates glued and screwed into either side of the cut rafters. And you may want to support the rafters before you haul out this knee wall and start repairing the rafters.
Hammer: You're right that these are rafters, not ceiling joists, even though the drywall is fastened to their underside.
SPHERE's explanation makes sense that it was done for nailing and placement. There is another three foot high wall past the knee wall thet is definitely load bearing and supports the main load of the roof.
if you could attach a drawing showing all the loactions, sizes, and load paths, it would be easier to understand and advise, but I would not ignore the engineeer based on your assumptions so far.of course, I also understand how dangerous it can be to ignore the demands of the missus.
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