Gone With The Wall
Our house was built in the 1930s by someone with a passion for designing tiny kitchens. Unfortunately, my wife and I do not share this passion and so we decided to knock through a load-bearing wall to open up the space for a bigger kitchen.
You can see from this floorplan our square-shaped kitchen which is tucked in the back corner of the house. Fortunately, there is room for expansion out into the dining room, and the space available is more generous than this drawing would suggest (as it is not quite to scale).
To give you a feel for the current kitchen, you can marvel at the 70s décor displayed in this photo from when our house was originally on the market.
Preparation
The removal of a load-bearing wall requires the installation of a steel beam so we engaged a local building firm to do the structural calculations for us.
To be honest it was a rocky start - the first draft of the calculation document came back addressed to a "Mr Saleem", and contained an indulgent quantity of spelling mistakes. My personal favourite was the labelled drawing of our "Ketchen".
I know spelling isn't everyone's strong point (and that's okay) but when you pay £400 for a PDF document, it should be a quality piece of work. Also, I was trusting these calculations to stop my house falling down, so the spelling inaccuracies made me question the maths.
However, after a few more revisions and some careful scrutiny of the calculations, it all looked good - the numbers were sound, so I ordered the steel beam and two padstones, which all arrived a few days later.
I was somewhat intimidated by the whole prospect of notifying the council planning office, but it turned out to be quite simple - there was an online form, I paid the fee, and we were assigned a building control officer, who we messaged 7 days ahead of the work commencing.
Installation Day 1
My wife and I are lucky to have access to two experienced builders - her parents, Joe and Julie - who kindly visited for a weekend to show us how to complete the job. They brought all sorts of gear including Acrow props, Strongboys, cement and power tools, as well as the knowledge on how to use it all.
We got an estimate from the firm who did the structural calculations but at £2,700 we felt that we'd be better off doing it ourselves - what's the worst that could happen...
The first step was to remove all the plaster from both sides of the wall, so I joined forces with my father in law and we set about the task, each armed with a hammer drill and chisel bit. The quantity of mess was incredible, and the biggest job of the whole weekend was going from a plastered wall, to bare brick.
With the plaster gone, we put up a scaffolding board on each side of the wall, held tight to the ceiling by Acrow props.
This supported the wooden floor joists, but we realised that the brick wall itself extended up another floor to separate the bathroom and bedroom above. We didn't have any additional props to hold up the brickwork so we left the concrete door lintel in place until the last minute, and carefully deconstructed the wall on each side.
The next big step was to get the padstones in and level, for which we utilised a scarily large angle grinder to cut slices of brick as shims.
When the time came, we quickly removed the concrete door lintel and lifted the steel into place so it could support the wall above. This was a challenging lift after holding 8kg of drill above my head most of the day, and we had to poke through to the other side of our living room wall to lever the steel into position.
At the end of day 1 we had finished all the heavy lifting but still hadn't put any mortar round the padstones - that would have to wait for day 2. There was also a little bit of wall left that was begging for a good hit with a sledge hammer...
The only casualty of the day came when the front fell off my drill and disappeared into the cavity of the wall. Hey ho.
It was time for a beer and a shower.
Installation Day 2
We awoke to the sound of chiselling and came downstairs to find Joe had already picked up tools and started work. Not wanting to be seen as a slacker, I quickly got dressed and joined him in removing the last little piece of wall.
With the wall gone and the bricks stacked outside, we had a bacon sandwich and acknowledged the good news that our house had not fallen down in the night.
The heavy work was done and the final item left on the list was to mortar in the beam and padstones. This involved cutting up lots of small sections of brick to fit in the nooks and crannies around the beam.
We left the Acrow props in place so that the beam (and the floor above) were supported as the mortar set. We didn't want to take them out too soon and risk all our carefully placed brickwork sagging under the weight.
With the job complete, we thanked Joe and Julie and helped them pack up all their tools for the journey home.
After waving them off, the only thing remaining was to flop onto the sofa and get some rest before the work week began early the next morning (this was a Sunday after all).
Building Control
A couple of days later the mortar was dry so we took out the Acrow props, and the beam remained reassuringly in position.
I rang our building control officer who came and did an on-site inspection. I was nervous for this, despite knowing we had done everything by the book - like when a police car is driving behind and you become irrationally jittery.
However, I needn't have worried - he was happy with the installation, and was out in a flash, apparently with 17 more site inspections to complete that day.
Conclusion
What can I say - we now have a gap where we once had a wall and that is exactly the desired result! (The Acrow props came out shortly after this photo)
As with all DIY it was a lot cheaper to complete ourselves, but we had to do all the leg work and it naturally ends up being a slower process.
There's no way I would have tackled this without the support of Joe and Julie, who have done several steel beam installations before and helped guide us through the process.
Would I recommend doing it yourself? That depends on your budget, timescales, what help/support you can access. However, as you can see from this blog post - if you do take on the job yourself, it sure makes for a good story.