concrete shelves causing house to collapse? whose liability?

citric

The back of my house has a long "storage room" that's more like a back hallway; each end has a door leading outside to the north and south sides of the house. On the south side of this room, I have cinder-block shelves comprised of 30 cinder blocks. If they weigh 30 lbs each, that's about 900 lbs. First question: could this cause a problem? As far as I can tell, code for my state dictates 40 lbs/square foot of "live load." If that's calculated per square foot, then my shelves are over because they're at about 54 pounds/square foot. If that's calculated over the whole room, I'm way under.

Now the liability part. For two years, the *north* side of this room has been sagging, causing the door to jam. The south side (the shelf side) has started to sag in the last couple months. My landlord's brilliant handyman has decided that the problem is my shelves. Could he be right -- do physics somehow warp so that an overload of the south end of my house could cause the north end to sag? And if so, could I be liable -- could the bastard sue me? (He and his handymen have known about the shelves for years now.)

Any construction- or legal-related insight would be great...

The Cat

why the hell are you building shelves out of giant heavy bricks when perfectly servicable plywood is available? And yes, large weights in one portion of the room will fuck up the structure (I'm assuming this is some kind of raised wooden frame building and you're not talking about a structure built directly onto a concrete pad).

supabeast

Don’t forget about the added weight of the books. I’m assuming that with all those bricks you have shelves to at least hold a few hundred pounds of them, if you’ve got mostly hardcovers you might have put over a ton of weight in a place that was never meant to handle it. Your landlord’s handyman may be right, and if you have a lease there is probably a clause requiring you to pay for any damage you cause to the house, so you could be screwed if he decides to sue you.

If I were you, I would immediately dismantle the shelves then head over to Ikea and buy several smaller units that can be scattered around. If you really can’t afford that, check Craigslist, or just rent a power saw and slap something together with 2x4s and plywood.

Diomedes240z

I'd say shelves are a dead load, not a live load. Find out what the dead load rating is if you can.