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I am replacing a 4 ft doorway in a load bearing wall with a 4 ft pocket door, which necessitates replacing the header in the wall with an 8 ft header (4 ft of door + 2x 2 ft of door pocket).

The wall is parallel to the joists, but the house has a hip roof. The wall is an interior wall only because of an addition that was added onto this side of the house -- this wall used to be the exterior wall. As a result, the wall does bear the load of the roof hip. However, since the wall is parallel to the joists, I cannot simply support the portion of the wall above the header by supporting the room ceiling.

How does one support the wall temporarily so that the header can be changed?

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If the “old hip roof” sits on a double top plate, you can just support the double top plate with 2x4’s set at an angle from the floor up through the ceiling up to the bottom of the top plate.

About 8’ of an interior bearing wall supporting an old hip roof does not “carry” that much weight. I’m sure a couple of 2x4 angle braces can TEMPORARILY support the hip roof.

More important to me is: What do the trimmers sit on? Make sure they are supported all the way down to the foundation.

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  • One jack stud sits over a header in the basement where the old garage door used to be before the addition. The header is absurdly oversized and should handle the additional load. The other side currently sits on the old CMU piller that used to be between the two garage doors, and would instead now sit over a load-bearing wall in the basement. (There probably was a second header where the second car bay used to be, but it was removed and replaced with a 2x4 wall instead.) I'm not worried about the load path to the foundation.
    – David Pfeffer
    Commented Dec 30, 2017 at 18:39
  • I like this solution better than what I was thinking. I was considering making a temporary beam and bolting it into the top plate, and then that header would span more than the area that I needed clear to remove and install the beam. I didn't think about using a diagonal load path.
    – David Pfeffer
    Commented Dec 30, 2017 at 18:40

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