I've recently moved into a 1930's split level bungalow and have started the task of renovating it.
I started on what I originally thought would be a nice easy job, which was removing a slight bounce in the floor of the master bedroom, this ended up with me having to lift the whole floor and rebuilding two knackered three foot tall honeycomb sleeper walls. With a new floor down in the master bedroom I moved onto the second bedroom and after a look under the floor it turns out that the honeycomb sleeper walls in there where even worse! As I didn't want to go through the massive job of lifting the whole floor again I decided to make good what was there and put in additional supports. As I have now spent a lot of time under the floor I have worked out that the reason so many of the honeycomb sleeper walls have died is because the concerete slab they are sitting on has dropped slightly, the exterior walls show no sign of movement so Im not overlly worried about this... or should I be?
Getting back to the reason of my post... as I said at the start of my post this property is a split level bungalow with a six step flight of stairs going from the living area at the top to the bedrooms and bathroom downstairs. Downstairs there is a 3 foot void under the floor and I had assumed that the upstairs would have a similar void, with a steeped concrete slab at the bottom. After lifting a floorboard upstairs what I actually found was a 7/8 foot void with honeycomb sleeper walls going down to the same level as the concrete slab as downstairs!!! Thankfully the concrete slab these walls sit on is solid so there doesn't look to be any problems down there but what I now want to do is knock through these honeycomb sleeper walls and insert lintels so I have a kind of celler space, firstly is this legal and secondly will the lintels work OK inplace of the honeycomb sleeper walls?
I started on what I originally thought would be a nice easy job, which was removing a slight bounce in the floor of the master bedroom, this ended up with me having to lift the whole floor and rebuilding two knackered three foot tall honeycomb sleeper walls. With a new floor down in the master bedroom I moved onto the second bedroom and after a look under the floor it turns out that the honeycomb sleeper walls in there where even worse! As I didn't want to go through the massive job of lifting the whole floor again I decided to make good what was there and put in additional supports. As I have now spent a lot of time under the floor I have worked out that the reason so many of the honeycomb sleeper walls have died is because the concerete slab they are sitting on has dropped slightly, the exterior walls show no sign of movement so Im not overlly worried about this... or should I be?
Getting back to the reason of my post... as I said at the start of my post this property is a split level bungalow with a six step flight of stairs going from the living area at the top to the bedrooms and bathroom downstairs. Downstairs there is a 3 foot void under the floor and I had assumed that the upstairs would have a similar void, with a steeped concrete slab at the bottom. After lifting a floorboard upstairs what I actually found was a 7/8 foot void with honeycomb sleeper walls going down to the same level as the concrete slab as downstairs!!! Thankfully the concrete slab these walls sit on is solid so there doesn't look to be any problems down there but what I now want to do is knock through these honeycomb sleeper walls and insert lintels so I have a kind of celler space, firstly is this legal and secondly will the lintels work OK inplace of the honeycomb sleeper walls?
