After the National Day holiday, another piece of news about the owner’s "savage decoration" appeared on the Internet hot search. In August, an owner of a community in Hangzhou, Zhejiang knocked out the load-bearing wall when decorating his house, causing the entire building to change. It is a Class D dilapidated building.
In October, the owner and contractor of the household had been taken criminal compulsory measures on suspicion of jeopardizing public safety in a dangerous manner through negligence.
Searching on the Chinese Judgment Documents website with "bearing wall" as a keyword, it can be found that such cases are not uncommon.
The infringement caused by the demolition and modification of the house's load-bearing wall has occurred in Liaoning, Hebei, Hunan, Jiangsu and other places since 2020.
It can be seen that many renovation owners still lack understanding of load-bearing walls.
Article 272 of the Civil Code stipulates: "The owner shall have the right to possess, use, profit and dispose of the exclusive part of his building. The exercise of the right by the owner shall not endanger the safety of the building or harm the lawful rights and interests of other owners." If the owner removes or changes the load-bearing wall and causes infringement, he may face fines and compensation. If it endangers public safety, it will also constitute a crime and need to bear more serious legal consequences.
"The load-bearing wall must not be touched. This is common sense." In an interview with a reporter from the Science and Technology Daily, Xing Lihua, a senior engineer of China Construction First Bureau (Group) Co., Ltd., reminded owners who wanted to decorate.
"When building a house, the weight of the entire building is calculated precisely, and the structure including the load-bearing wall will be designed in accordance with the calculation results. Changing the load-bearing wall may cause the whole body to be affected."
Xing Lihua said that the infill wall can be demolished by the owner during the renovation and renovation, while the load-bearing wall must not be demolished or modified.
If there are no professionals around, the easiest way to judge the load-bearing wall is to refer to the original floor plan given to each owner by the developer and the property.
Walls marked as black/shaded on the drawing are load-bearing walls, and walls marked as gray/white are infill walls.
"Major adjustments to the house structure require strict calculations and reinforcement. The general households do not have this ability, let alone touch the'red line' during the decoration." Xing Lihua added.
In engineering design, different house structures also mean differences in load-bearing walls.
Generally speaking, almost all walls of brick-concrete houses are load-bearing walls. This type of house is more common in old communities built before the 1990s; frame-shear houses have both load-bearing walls and shear walls. They are under renovation. These two types of walls cannot be touched, only infill walls can be demolished. This type of house is commonly found in many high-rise residential buildings today; the internal walls of frame-structured houses are generally not load-bearing walls. Most of these houses are large shopping malls, Office building.
Trainee reporter Sun Mingyuan