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Had a structural engineer tell me my header sizes were overkill last week
Been drafting residential for about 4 years now and a structural engineer I work with finally called me out on making my headers WAY too beefy. He said I was basically designing for a two-story load on single story houses. Turns out I was just copying what I saw in older plans without actually checking the span tables myself. Made me feel kind of dumb but I went back and looked at the IRC tables and sure enough I was oversizing by at least 2 inches on most openings. Now I actually reference the span chart for every job instead of guessing. Has anyone else had someone point out a bad habit you picked up from just repeating what you saw?
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