One of our recent projects in Saint-Laurent-du-Var involved the demolition of a load-bearing wall followed by its replacement with steel reinforcement.
The engineer from the structural engineering office specified a method to follow through every stage of the project. After protecting the premises with plastic sheeting, we installed temporary propping to support the wall during demolition. For the steel reinforcement, the engineer chose an IPE200 beam placed and welded on a UPE100 reinforcing column at one end and on a reinforced concrete padstone at the other.
Removing a load-bearing wall and replacing it with a beam is very different from removing non-load-bearing interior walls. Load-bearing walls are structural elements that help support the weight of the house. Non-load-bearing walls, also called partitions, do not carry loads from above and are simply there to divide spaces. If you are thinking of taking down a load-bearing wall, whether you plan to do the work yourself or hire a contractor, you first need to settle some fundamental questions.
If you remove something, it must be replaced by reinforcement. To see how this works on a small scale, think of the windows in your house. Walls are the best way to support a house; making a hole in a wall can only weaken that. But window lintels, which are essentially small beams, serve to replace the part removed from the wall frame. The same principle applies to load-bearing walls, but on a larger scale. When you or a contractor remove a load-bearing wall, it has to be replaced. There are two main techniques for strengthening a demolished load-bearing wall. One is a steel beam only: a horizontal structural beam of sufficient size. This technique is also called a ‘beam on padstones’. The beam has no vertical supports. The second technique is the ‘portal frame’. It consists of a beam and a column: a horizontal beam with one or more intermediate columns between the two end supports.
