Straight answers, before you call

If the wall carries load, usually yes — many permit offices want sealed drawings or calculations before approving the work, though requirements vary and a simple header sometimes clears without them. Your permit office is the one that decides.Even when a wall turns out to be non-structural, a short letter confirming it is useful documentation later, when a buyer, an inspector, or an insurer asks what happened to that wall. The engineering is the inexpensive part of a wall removal. Discovering mid-demolition that the wall was carrying a roof load is not.

There are hints. Walls running perpendicular to the floor joists above them, walls stacked over a beam or a foundation wall, walls near the center of the house, and walls that continue up through more than one floor are all more likely to be carrying load.But a wall running parallel to the joists can be bearing too — picking up a post from above, or catching roof framing braced down onto it. In stick-framed Atlanta houses from the 1970s–1990s that is common, and it is the case people miss.So the hints narrow the question; they don't settle it. What settles it is looking at the framing from below and from the attic above and following the load down. That is a look worth having an engineer take rather than a demolition hammer.

Often, yes. An experienced contractor has seen a lot of framing and their read is worth taking seriously, and plenty of jobs genuinely don't need an engineer.Where it's worth a second look: your permit office decides what it requires, not your contractor, so it's worth confirming before demolition starts rather than after. And on anything where the load path isn't obvious, a short consultation costs less than a stalled permit.

Some are and some aren't, and the pattern matters more than the width. Concrete and block shrink as they cure, brick and mortar move with moisture and temperature, and houses settle — so fine vertical or diagonal cracking is common and often cosmetic. The ones that need a look promptly are different: cracks that run horizontally, cracks that step diagonally through block joints, any crack where one side has shifted out of plane with the other, cracks that are visibly widening over months, and cracking that arrives together with doors and windows that have started to stick. If yours is in that second group, don't sit on it.Telling those apart on a specific wall takes a site visit, not a photograph. What we can do from photos is tell you whether it warrants one.

No. We're engineers, not contractors, and we don't sell repairs. That's deliberate, and it's useful to you: because we have no repair work to quote, our assessment isn't tied to what a repair would be worth. If repair is warranted we describe what it has to accomplish, and you take that description to several contractors and compare their bids on equal terms.