I own a house with a front porch that was converted into a three season porch prior to my ownership. I plan on converting the porch back to it’s original “one season” style but am unsure where to begin. The roof of the house extends over the porch so support for it is a concern and I’m wondering how to best gage the current load on it’s supports. Any advice would help.
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Judging from your photo, it appears to me that there are three columns that are holding up the roof above your porch; they are at each front corner of your porch, and there’s one mid-span that is one window light away from your door. I suspect that there is a horizontal beam that spans above, across the two outer columns and supported midway by that third column. Judging from what looks like perhaps a 12-ft span between the furthermost column and the mid-span column, there’s probably something close to a 4 x 12 beam lying across those three columns. Each of those columns must extend all the way down to some type of support footing that is in the ground underneath each column. You might want to check this out to confirm that what appear to be columns in your photo do indeed perform a structural support role for your porch roof. Is there a crawl space access underneath the porch that you could look into to find out?
One thing to remember is that windows, doors and other openings are not and should not be designed to bear the weight of a weight load from above. Otherwise they will begin to bind up and distort out of shape, rendering them inoperative at best, and broken/non-supportive at worst. That’s why there’s a horizontal beam that lies on the columns; the beam spreads the weight load from above into the supporting columns. The vertical pieces (“mullionsâ€) between each of your windows (“lightsâ€) serve only to separate one from another, and not to support any weight from above.
So what does this all mean? My GUESS is, that if all of the house structure at your roof is as it was when constructed, your windows and door can be removed without adding any additional supports for the porch roof.
One caveat: I am not an architect, a structural engineer, nor a building inspector. You might want to hire a qualified structural engineer for a few hours to render an opinion on this matter.
Tejonista, Orange County, Calif.
One more piece of info. The middle support doesn't seem to be supporting any weight. When looking at the point where the support meets the roof I can see directly outside. Very odd. This house was built in 1914 so it has settled quite a bit but this seems to be kind of alarming.
It may be OK. If you drive around and look at other homes from that time period you will see that many of them have a porch with what looks like an unsupported roof on one side of the doorway. There's a support but no post. I'm not sure why this was the style but it is quite common in homes of the same vintage as yours. It's possible that your home had the same, but when the porch was enclosed they added the other post for aesthetic reasons.
Take a look at the attached photo for an example.
Good looking house...are you trying to sell it?
So, it looks to me that the windows etc are a 'curtain' - just infil - and that the original structure would still be viable. Look to see if thee's evidence that any posts have been taken out - if not, I'd say take everything out. Your local BI might give a free opinion, or hire a structural eng'r if you're really worried.
All the best...
To those who know - this may be obvious. To those who don't - I hope I've helped.
Thanks for the information.