wall supporting concrete floor. Need structural advice pleas

hi all,
just about to start work and convert a kitchen to include a couple of internal rooms and make it bigger.

The house is a funny one. There's an integral garage that has a concrete and steel beam roof. The concrete slab extends through the back of the house and outside by about 25cm. In all the slab is about 7' wide and 34' long.

I'd like to extend the kitchen into an area where the slab is the ceiling. The wall I want to knock down has no other brickwork above it. It's about 3.4m long with two doors in it. The slab is supported by the outside wall (33' long), rear wall (7' part of it), front wall containing Garage doors and inside wall about 20' long.

My question is, does it sound like the wall I want to take down is structural?

Do I get a builder to look at it and trust his experience or else a structural engineer and how would they assess it?

I have a layout of the floorplan which I've uploaded to GWS stuff.

thanks for looking and I hope you can help.

cheers
GW

Post a pic please

Pictures now in GWS folder
cheers
Pres

GWS?

Shytalkz said:

GWS?

Click to expand...

Think he means his album Shy.

Hi,
Sorry, yes it's in my folder. I'm not familiar with the board yet to know how to describe things.
Thanks Hotrod for the pointer.
Pres

Got you .

That is unusual, as you say. Is it an ex Plod/Nurses house?

Are you saying that - pic ref "another view" that the two windows closest to the gable are in the same room? If so, is the floor over the current kitchen concrete, or timber, so that you've got different floors in the upstairs room?

The most logical way that the slab spans is onto that wall and that the two passageway walls are not load-bearing. But, equally, it could run parallel to the wall.

Quite often, roof slabs on places of that type and age were cast over a Hyrib type permanent former, which also doubled as reinforcement to the slab. This is a perforated mesh, with ribs every so often. The good thing about this is that the direction in which the ribs run is the span direction of the slab.

Unfortunately, the Hyrib website appears to be down atm, however if you go here, look at the second picture down and rotate it in your mind's eye 90 degrees - that will give you an idea of what it would look like from under your concrete roof.

Yours has probably been rendered, so knock some of that back to the concrete and hopefully there will be this kind of reinforcing. IF it runs towards the wall you want to take out, then you will have to put a beam in. If it goes the other way, then you will probably need to put beams on the line of the passageway walls that you want to remove, as well as the beam on the line of the partition with the doors in.

Hi Shy,
Thanks for the quick and helpful reply.

The website is up again so I understand what you're saying. I think there's a view in the garage that shows the reinforcement so I'll try to get a picture of that tomorrow and I'll have a look at the the other points you've suggested.

BTW the two windows are one room though there's a mark on the upstairs ceiling that indicates they were different rooms at some point (though the left hand one isnt much wider than the window). We think it might have been designed as a bathroom and toilet then changed before the house was completed.

As for being ex-plod / nurses home, I don't know of anything in the history yet to go with that.

Thanks again for your help. This forum is great.

Pres

Hi all,
Quick update.
Took the ceiling down in the area I'm interested in and found that the roof isnt concrete all the way through. It is in the garage then it stops. The wall in the picture supports the upstairs floor joists only as they are about 5m long and are resting on this wall on their way past.
The concrete section at the back of the house only goes as far as the external house wall and acts as a lintel for the upstairs.
Builders advice is to hike the concrete section out and replace with a steel to prevent future problems with condensation through the concrete section.

I'm just waiting for costs to include that steel and one to replace the internal wall that supports the joists (as described above).

I hope this is clear. Thanks all for your help and I'll be back with more questions in the future.

cheers
P