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My master and guest bathroom are back-to-back (toilet-to-toilet). Both bathrooms have a tall skylight this size (~4' square). The skylights are about 5 feet apart from one-another.

Master Bathroom, looking south east: 4 short walls to remove Layout: floorplan and structure

I want to remove the four short walls to end up with one long smooth wall. Does the presence of a skylight nearby make these walls likely to be load bearing?

I searched and found: Are there ways to determine if a wall is load bearing?

Walls Though each wall shown runs perpendicular to the roof ridgeline, it occurs to me that taken together, they are parallel with the roof ridgeline and might constitute a supporting structure.

The closet walls have a double top plate, as shown. The East wall of the master bath is parallel with the roof ridgeline and just short of 20' long.

Attic This roof ridgeline is about 20' long here. On the South end of that ridge, the roof stair-steps down twice to an external wall. On the North end of the ridge, is a chimney and a vertical wall where this roof ends and stands above the living room roof by 2 or 3 feet. There are a few boards vertical boards in the attic that connect joists to the ridgeline, but they don't seem structural to me.

Foundation It's a concrete slab. There is no basement.

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  • Thanks, Niall, for the suggestion, link, and the welcome!
    – colbybhearn
    Jul 28, 2015 at 2:35
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    That ridge beam does not look sized to span that distance unsupported. I would say that your walls below and the verticals are indeed contributing to support the roof.
    – Jimmy Fix-it
    Jul 28, 2015 at 3:08
  • Thanks @JimmyFix-it, for your input - I'm leaning a lot! That's a good point about the ridge beam size.
    – colbybhearn
    Jul 28, 2015 at 3:49
  • I could be wrong though, use of metal joist hangers allows ridge beam of smaller dimension... I can't tell from the pic if it's just nailed or has hangers.
    – Jimmy Fix-it
    Jul 28, 2015 at 4:05

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OK, I've had remodelers tell my wife that those walls are not load bearing (they didn't go into the attic).

Meanwhile, I've had a friend from church with framing experience look closely in the attic and say I definitely need to transfer the load being carried by these boards and walls and have at least one board to keep the roof from racking away from the rest of the house.

While drawing the diagram in my heavily edited question, I came to see how there must be some load on these few vertical boards, so I'm going that route recommended by my friend.

I'll cut a few boards to go from the ridge-line beam to the nearby load bearing hallway wall and closet walls, toenail them in, then begin removing the existing partitioning walls below.

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  • I'll be removing the few vertical boards in the attic first. This is supposed to prevent them from cracking the drywall ceiling below when I remove the partition walls in the master bath. I'll be leaving the anti-racking board in the attic.
    – colbybhearn
    Aug 18, 2015 at 15:22

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