Our house has these drop walls in almost every entrance to a room on the first floor.  We decided to remove them to open up the room entrances and give the floor layout a better flow.  We also decided to get rid of this small wall jutting past the closet.  I've cut in to remove it, why would the end studs be sistered together?

Jack stud and king stud.
Jack stud is under header.

Sure those aren't load bearing walls?

Might be why you have those drops.

Eta: if the wall supports the roof or the floor above it, there will be a header over any openings, which would explain those dropped areas.

Can't really remove that header without redesigning the second floor structure.

Which way do the second floor joists run?

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Looking at where the stair opening is, I'm pretty sure both of those walls are load bearing.

This.

These are most likely weight bearing. I wouldn't touch them if I were you.

OP six months from now:  No idea why all my walls have cracks in the corners, any thoughts?

The 2nd floor joists run parallel with the wall and entrance way I'm working on.  There is a load bearing wall marked with the X and a beam here:

If you have to ask that question you should not be doing what you're doing.

Cut some sheetrock out of the space above the door.  If you only have a couble of 2x4s going horizontal, you're good to go.  If it's 2x4 + 2x10 + 2x4, stop and patch up your sheetrock.

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Pffffffft. Walls. Who needs 'em!


In all seriousness OP, you do. They look load bearing to me.

Could be that those entrances to rooms were dropped to the same height as the beam you pictured so they all matched for aesthetic reasons.

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Appears beam is bearing but entrance to sitting room is GTG. Most openings bearing or not have min. 2x8 headers. At least that's code where I am.

Since you have a second story, it's likely all your interior wall are load bearing.

I wouldn't do that if I were you.

Suggest you have a real contractor do the initial work; you can save money by doing the finish work yourself.  If he looks at what you have opened up there and balks, you have your answer.

This thread has generated quite a bit of interest with some of it not being positive, so I'll provide an explanation and update:  While not having a formal education or experience in engineering/construction, I am actually quite handy and do alot of home projects myself.  I move slow, but I make sure my work is done right.  I obviously have not removed walls before and don't know the underlying concept of pass-throughs. 

So: wife is fed up with five different types of flooring on the 1st floor of the house so we're having that all removed and laminate planking installed.  I would do it myself, but I am too busy working on another major home project and discovered last summer when installing decking that my lower and upper back does not take well to being bent and hunched over for long periods of time.  Therefore wife insists that a flooring contractor does the work, which I'm fine with.  We had talked about removing these drop walls and the small wall in my first post before, and figured we might as well throw that in before the floors are done.  A home renovator stated that all the drop walls to be removed were not located in load bearing walls.  I had just hired him for the removal when we got hit with a $7100 Federal tax bill.  Dwindling funds dictate we can't have the drop walls removed at this time.  With the flooring install scheduled, I was going to remove just that small wall and leave the drop walls for a later date for either the home renovator or me.

Back to the small wall removal, there is a stud in the wall right past the corner where the closet wall meets that small extended living room wall;


The easy route for me would be to leave that stud there and drywall around it.  This would leave about a 2" wall in place of the 7-8" one.  Which the wife says would drive her nuts.  Removing that stud and then installing another one inside the remaining wall is just too much effort for minimal gains, so now we've decided to leave the small wall. 

Going back to the drop walls in the pass-throughs, I found this which explains to me the concept of a load bearing wall with a pass-through:



After some poking and probing, I found that I don't have jack studs or a header.  It's two studs sistered together on each side of the pass-through, and the header is just a 2x4 run across horizontally.  Two cripple studs though.  Here's some more pictures taken from the same standing point on the 1st floor showing the floor plan with the beams and pass-through drop walls:

This shows the beam on the east side of the house and how the stairs wrap 90degrees in front of the wall that houses the other beam on the west side of the house;


Pass-through into the dining room with drop wall unlabeled by MS Paint, but drop wall in the other pass-through labeled;


Standing in front of the other dining room pass-through with the west side beam visible on the other side, past the basement door on the left and garage door on the right;

^^^ This ^^^

I don't understand how removing the the short wall section is any harder than removing the drop downs.  

Your corner should be framed like the internal T intersection shown on the right, below




The 3 stud part is built into the wall you are shortening.  The wall that butts into it has the single stud at it's end.  You would just remove the one stud that you already see, turn it 90 degrees and stick it right back into the empty space in the corner and toenail it in flush with the new corner of your wall.

this.
Door/opening framing


J-

If you don't open it up to expose exactly what, where and how the load Bering surfaces are supported you are asking for trouble. Especially in a 2 story home.

Edit: unless you have the drawings ?

Patch those holes, repaint and tell the old lady to deal with it... Load bearing or not, you're gonna open a can of worms for nothing more than looks...

No jack-studs would be odd, did you actually remove the drywall or are you just poking through the drywall to feel if there is a stud behind there? If you're just poking through, I bet there is a cripple on top of the header that is sitting on top of the jack-stud.

That being said, I'm with you OP. We recently removed an entire wall from our house. The previous homeowner told us it was load-bearing and it couldn't be removed. I thought otherwise, had it checked out by 3 construction guys I know, and got a final look-over from a PE I work with. The truth came when we peeled drywall off the wall; 2X4 headers (even over a 6-foot double door opening) meant if it was supposed to be load-bearing it sure wouldn't actually bear a load.

Things to consider when tearing that out:
#1 If you're going to go all the way to the ceiling you will have to have the ceiling patched. Textured ceilings are a PITA to patch & blend. We hired one of the best local drywallers and he did an amazing job; you can still see the places the walls were removed if the lighting is right.
#2 You will have to relocate any electrical (light-switches, thermostat wires, etc) that are in those walls. If you don't have access to where the wires run from you're going to have to cut holes in the floor or ceiling to be able to drill new holes in the top/bottom of the stud cavity to pass wires through. For me, everything I was doing was accessible but I did have to use some junction boxes in the attic to "extend" wire runs over to where the switches were being relocated to.

I would definitely do the work necessary to get the corner like you want it. Don't just leave a 2" wall there. It's not hard to remove the offending stud, cut things back, and toe-nail the stud back in so the wall will be flush. Heck, I added a door into a wall without removing any drywall. Cut drywall to rough opening size, poke sawzall through drywall 3-1/2" above top of opening and cut off any studs that fall in the opening (to make room for 2X4 header), the top portion of those studs will become your cripples, the bottom portion, once trimmed to length, will become your jack-studs. Then slide king-studs up into the wall and nail, then any additional cripples, then the header, then the jack-studs. Patch over the small cuts left by the sawzall and install the door. If that can be done then you can certainly do a corner where 2 walls meet, especially since it will already be missing drywall.


Lastly, to the picture below. Be careful with what you do to the one you marked. Depending on where the stairs end that may be a load-bearing wall. The floor joists are cut for the stairs to rise up through and the cut joists are likely bearing onto the walls on each side of the 2nd set of stairs (after they turn the corner). We also had to deal with stairs; our 2nd story is "room in roof" or "room in attic" trusses, the builder cut 2 trusses for the stairs and didn't sister the ones next to the stairs, they just boxed the opening in with 2X12's and nailed them onto the end of the cut trusses. It was shady. While the entire wall we removed was not load-bearing, the 2 king-studs that fell right at the corners of the stair opening most-definitely were carrying load (whether it was designed to or not). We opened the ceiling up, sistered 2X12's onto the ones in the stair opening and spanned them over to the load-bearing wall 4 feet away. When we sistered those 2X12's in we popped some drywall seams where it had clearly started sagging a bit over the years. I used joist-hangers and joist nails where I could and I use Spax high-shear screws to sister them together. It makes me feel a lot better about it now; it's definitely more robust than it was before.

Sorry to get long-winded, just be careful near the top of the stairs.

Still need to open it up and look.

You cannot rely on plans to ensure framing.

That looks like a lot of work and mess for a little cosmetic reward imo

Jack studs do not *always* mean it's a load bearing wall.

I had a t-shaped wall in my home with a pocket door and the wall not only had jack studs on both sides but had a 2x4 'box' where the T joint was. Really weird. Non load bearing.

THIS.

Yup, after reading everything on here and the poking around on my part, forget it.  Removing the vertical wall by the closet would be too much mess for too little reward.  Floor installation starts Tuesday, at some point in the future I'll tackle the doorways. 

On openings designed for doors you still use a pair to take the load of the door and the impact of closing the door.

Agreed.

If you must move them, you need to control the weight they are holding in another way.....best conceived by a structural engineer.

Correct - this was probably the case. The sistered 2x4's on the tops of the walls I removed were not even touching the bottom of the roof trusses above (I have a fancy roof with V-shaped trusses in that area and not triangle shaped) - so they were very much *NOT* load bearing in my case