Removing brick larder from Kitchen

Morning all,

Firstly this will be the first of many posts on to DIYnot.com, so thank you in advance to all who respond in the future.

The first (lots of firsts) of many jobs I will be completing on my newly purchased house will be to remove the brick built kitchen larder, including its concrete cold shelf.

I'm creating this post, firstly asking for advise on how to proceed and secondly to assist anyone that is going to try this in the future, as I have found very little information on this subject on t'internet.

So, here's a list of things I can think of to do.

1) determine if the wall is load bearing.
Get a builder, architect or structural surveyor to confirm.

2) Remove/move anything you want to keep from the brick wall being demolished, to another location. In my case this was part of the electrical CU.

3) Remove the concrete cold shelf (very carefully)

4) Take out the brick wall (starting from the top - very carefully)

5) Make good.

So, where am I at the moment?

I'm currently 85% sure that the wall is not load bearing, I'm hopefully going to have this confirmed tomorrow by a friend that designs conversions.

I'm also waiting for a sparky to quote for moving part of the CU on to the perpendicular wall

In the interim I am going to remove the concrete shelf by drilling a few holes then using a club hammer to remove 5-7 cm of the shelf, hopefully weakened by the holes.

I will take a few pictures and post them later.

Watch this space and if I stop posting then i've broken something I wasn't supposed to, most likely my arm....

Hi, for what it is worth my old house has a brick built pantry complete with concrete shelf. In theory I could whip out the walls because there is no wall above and floor joists above pass over this brick wall in one continous length. Length ,size and spacing of joists above being the same as others where no pantry below exists.

However! - The room above is a bathroom and sited along the line of the joists above the panty is both bath and hot water cylinder. So locally the joists there take a fair old load. If I ever decide to take out the pantry I would also double up on the joists above to compensate. You also need to inspect what previous owners have done to the joists to in terms of notches and holes.

The person you use in your item 1 should pick these issues up, so chose your professionals carefully and good luck.

Firstly,

Thank you for the information, your home layout sounds exactly the same as ours.

We've decided to get a builder in to remove the wall as the LTGF panics when she see's mw weilding a lump hamer.

We're removing the old boiler / storage heater so this should remove some of the load, we are also relocating the bath so it sits next to the exterior wall, which should hopefully take the load without concern.

Once I have a few quotes in for the work I'll post their details on line.

Any compedent builder will check that the wall is/isnt load bearing before removal.. normally done by hacking a little bit of ceiling plaster or a top brick or two out of the wall to see the span of the joists above and if they sit on the wall..

hi, sorry i can't help you much here with the building, i was reading this post for tips myself, but:-

Could you elaborate a bit about what you mean about 'move part of electrical C/U' please (i'm a spark and curious as to what you mean)

Are you planning on re-fitting the existing board or fitting new?

With regard to the electrical statement.

An additional electrical line was added to the mains, with its own fuse, seperate from the main fuseboard as there was no more capacity. I believe this extra line was for a retro fitted shower.

Anyway, to summarise I killed the power to the house at the main isolator, unscrewed the extra fuse fixing from to wall and turned the power back on so I could then remove the larder wall.

To remove the wall I used a lump hammer to clear all the plaster from the brickwork then working from the top, remove one row of bricks at a time until I was about a third of the way down. I then used a 5kg sledge hammer to clear the rest of the walls.

I now have a wall sized hole in the ceiling and adjoining wall, so time to tidy up any loose edges and appoint a plasterer to re-skim.