The cantelever looks real scary at first… but if you look at the wall logs (side walls) they cantelever way back and help carry the load. There’d be more if they weren’t interruped by the window.
The floor joists bearing on the beam (yep, it’s got a bow) below the popped-out gable wall cantelever way back into the home, so they help too.
The two posts look skinny (7-8"), but how much are they really carrying?
This is one of those where “it all helps” considering the puny log “headers” above the overhead door type opening carrying the floor logs.
Certainly a design that is lacking.
I fail to find anything obviously wrong. The cantilever is tiny, and in fact isn’t even a cantilever, so the loads on the posts are also minuscule. There would have to be a lot more information available in order to evaluate it any further.
Richard, can you elaborate a little?
Okay. The overhang appears to be four feet wide. Half of the floor load on that four feet is carried by the log/beam across the front of the house. If we use a design total load of 50 PSF, and assume the house is 20 feet wide, the log/beam carries 2,000 pounds design floor load plus the weight of the wall above. Half of that is 1,000 pounds which is the design load on each of the two posts, ignoring the weight of the wall. The posts appear to be eight inches in diameter, which is far in excess of what would be required for the design load.
A normal wall weighs about 10 pounds per square foot. Maybe the log wall weighs, what? 30 pounds? At an average height of maybe 11 feet, that’s another 330 pounds per foot on the beam, or another 6600 pounds. Thus, the weight of the wall is far greater than the floor load, and that brings the total load on each column to 4300 pounds. I’m not going to do the column calculation; I’ll just state an opinion that the column can carry much more than 4300 pounds.
Excellent Richard, thank you.
Kenton,
What would you guesstimate the cantilevered section weights? Id imagine just the outside wall alone is pretty impressive. We are not talking kiln dried 2X4’s here, but whole logs. Is there such a calculation?
EDIT I guess I should have read further down, Richard tackled this in his post.
On a side note, it looks like they were doing a pretting good job at filling in the checking at the log ends.