[bglinkerman]

We have a new house (built last year) with an open floor plan. We have a 2-story living room and have recently installed a faux fireplace on the one wall. By faux fireplace, I mean we built a bump out, stoned it up to the ceiling and installed an electric fireplace. It's a little late now, but I am a little concerned about the weight of the wall. The structure we built, including the stone, weighs about 2,400 lbs. The wall it was built on is a load bearing wall with a steel beam under it and a steel column supporting the beam in the basement (and both ends of the beam are supported by the concrete foundation walls). The fireplace bump out is 6" deep and 87" wide so the wall spans 5-6 joists. Does anyone have any thoughts as to whether this load will be ok spanned over that many joists and directly above a load-bearing wall or should I seriously be considering having a structural engineer come out (it would be around $900 for that).


I've attached a picture of the nearly-complete fireplace so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

 

[Windows on Wash]

Lets see a picture of the basement under it.


Love the look so far. Very nice.

 

[Nealtw]

We have a new house (built last year) with an open floor plan. We have a 2-story living room and have recently installed a faux fireplace on the one wall. By faux fireplace, I mean we built a bump out, stoned it up to the ceiling and installed an electric fireplace. It's a little late now, but I am a little concerned about the weight of the wall. The structure we built, including the stone, weighs about 2,400 lbs. The wall it was built on is a load bearing wall with a steel beam under it and a steel column supporting the beam in the basement (and both ends of the beam are supported by the concrete foundation walls). The fireplace bump out is 6" deep and 87" wide so the wall spans 5-6 joists. Does anyone have any thoughts as to whether this load will be ok spanned over that many joists and directly above a load-bearing wall or should I seriously be considering having a structural engineer come out (it would be around $900 for that).


I've attached a picture of the nearly-complete fireplace so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

How well was that structure attached to the wall, no blocking and lag bolts?
Can you post a picture of the beam right below this?

 

[Nealtw]

Lets see a picture of the basement under it.


Love the look so far. Very nice.

Hhm, we have built a few like that, I don't think anyone ever thought about the wright. :surprise:

 

[bglinkerman]

As far as attaching to the existing structure, I place cross-supports every 24" going up the wall and attached to every perpendicular joist with 3" structural screws. I then attached my bump out wall to those cross-supports. Also worth noting, where the cross-supports are attached to the wall I removed the drywall from behind them so it is wood-on-wood. I then used fireblocking foam around the edges.

For the pictures in the basement the green squares are roughly where the fireplace sits on the floor above. The yellow square is the steel column nearest the fireplace. As you can see in the pictures there are some overlapping joists coming from the other direction so there is hopefully some additional support from those as well. The wall under the steel beam is built from 2x6s.

 

[Nealtw]

Bump that wall out to this side of the beam Or just build another wall

 

[3onthetree]

If the main wall is over the beam, and I see squash blocks, looks fine to me. You've done a good job framing the fireplace to transfer some of the weight to the wall.

 

[bglinkerman]

Thanks for all your advice everyone.