NLB CMU Wall

[spatia]

I am purchasing an older single floor warehouse building that has had several addons over the years. The original building has its roof trusses parallel to the cmu walls with steel posts located centrally throughout the building every 14 ish feet. I believe the exterior walls are NLB with only a half dozen steel beams intersecting the CMU walls where the posts are located in the building. Posts being the support for the roof.

If I was interested in removing the central posts and installing a new roof that used the exterior CMU walls for their support. Is this possible? I would want to have a deck on the new roof that supported a hot tub with a maximum load of 150lb/sqft. Do they manufacture flat steel roof trusses to support that span (28 ft) and that load?

Thanks.

 

[Ron]

Almost anything CAN be designed, provided you want to spend the money to see fruition. What you seem to be proposing is to gut the building, salvaging only the Non-load bearing (NLB) masonry walls. Since those walls were likely designed as NLB they likely have no reinforcement. It would be difficult and expensive to provide reinforcement of the wall to support the proposed trusses, and very difficult indeed to provide uplift and seismic resistance to meet current code requirements if those are necessary in your area.

Not economically practicable to do what you propose.