Lateral wall support

welshguy84

GDB2222 said:

How do you intend to hide the soil stack, if you remove that wall?  Perhaps, leaving say 1m of wall would serve two purposes?

It's only 18cm from the wall at its furthest point and was intending to run battens down the wall and box it in 

stuart45

welshguy84 said:

tacpot12 said:

If the back wall of the house is correctly constructed (i.e. the inner and outer leaves are correctly tied together), I think you will be fine. 

The wall you are removing will have been providing some lateral restraint, but I think that the 1st floor joists would be more than able to provide the required restraint, providing the joists are resting directly on the inner leaf and have been installed correctly so that they have enough bearing under them - the weight on the joists provides all the friction needed to tranfer the lateral loads from wall to joist in both tension and compression. The situation is different if the joists are hung on hangers - in that case, every few joists should have a lateral restraint strap.  

I'll caveat my comment by saying that I am a householder with a very limited knowledge of structural engineering. I'm not a builder or a structural engineer.

I have no idea what joist hangers are but from this pic I'm pretty sure it's your 1st scenario, resting on the inner leaf as in this pic, the joists are very large to 195mm by 50mm each 

The joists are built in, so that's better for the restraint.
195mm x50mm(8x2) is a standard size for upper floors.

stuart45

Section62 said:

stuart45 said:

It will be giving some lateral support to the walls, but the amount it gives and whether it will have any noticeable effect is the job for an SE.
Some of them might say it's OK, others might design a windpost into it.

 and it looks as if there is an unusually large amount of brickwork above the ground floor windows... unless that is an optical illusion from the camera angle.

There's 25 courses of brickwork in the central band, so it must have really high ceilings, with 3ft high frames upstairs.