What a removed wall was carrying

Often I'll get a call and people will notice one or two things and they think that they're separate problems. But really, they're all telling the same story. Right. So when you have a slab that starting to crack, you know, like the corners are starting to crack off and you have a wall where you have the molding at the top is starting to crack, you might think, oh, well, I have an issue in the ceiling and I have an issue in the floor. But really, what's happening is it's one issue. And this is kind of the story that your building is is telling. It's like a it's kind of a mystery story. Right. Every wall that you take out was carrying something, even the ones that people called non load bearing. In addition, what today that we might call non load bearing, so a contractor that's been building for 20 years, his whole career, he's been told that basically the load bearing walls are on the exterior. And that's true. However, in the older homes and probably pre 1960s, they had what they called load bearing center wall as well. So they may be they may be under the wrong assumption that they are removing a non load bearing wall, even though it's actually a load bearing wall. In addition to that, even if it is a truly non load bearing wall for gravity loads, like maybe your roof, maybe your roof spans over this wall in the middle. So your exterior walls are load bearing. That wall in the middle is there to help keep your house from pancaking. So for lateral loads for wind or seismic. And there's a requirement that you can't have like more than 20 feet between walls. If you have a 26 foot wide house, that wall in the middle, it might not be carrying your snow load and your trusses, but it is definitely helping to stiffen up your whole house. So that bowed beam that it's not going to snap right away, that missing non load bearing wall in the middle might not be an issue for a long time. But once the wind blows a little too strong, it could be. So just make sure that most of the things that you do are engineered, that you have an engineer look over them.