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In the continuing sometimes fun and sometimes frustrating passtime of building my own house, I have another question.
I’m wondering how bay windows are normally supported when they are placed
in a straight wall.Do I just angle braces from the bottom of the window back to the wall, or is there some other way of doing this.
How about the roof. How are the rafters normally supported above the window. Do I just run a top plate on top of the window and set my rafters on that?
I’ve attached a very rough drawing with my proposed braces and rafters shown as dotted lines.
Looking for any suggestions or help. Thanks in advance
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I submitted a drawing to our building inspector for our bays that was almost as schematic as yours and they all but laughed. My early days. Instead, the inspectro dropped by the morning of the installation to check what the carpenters we hired intended to do.
Our bays are fairly small -- about 5' across, 2' projection -- and are supported partly just by being nailed to the wall studs. The skirting underneath has a couple of braces as you are considering building, attached to a ledger nailed to the house and boxed in for appearances (I don't like the tapered skirt look much).
Need more detail, like size of bay. If it is heavy and/or will have people sitting in it posts to the ground are the strongest, but wall mounting is possible if the wall is strong enough. The bay manuf. most likely has guidelines of what is sufficient. The roof you want is called a "hip roof" which is not that complicated to frame if you like geometry -- basically rafters radiate from the wall to the outside of the bay, forming three planes.
I've read some people use cables to "hang" the bay from the header, permitting easy adjustment -- not familiar with this.