There is a large beam in my kitchen & it's in the way of my new kitchen

[KatyMac]

Apparently it's keeping the floor up in the bedroom so I can't move it

So how does this layout look? The bean is above the middle of the right hand cupboard & I thought to fill the space with a bit of wood?

How big is the beam?
maybe have deeper wall units and put dummy doors in front?
wood will look nice if it suits your house, a nice rustic beam will be a nice contrast

The beam is across the ceiling coming towards you - so it's in that little green bit on the right handside

The 'wood' will be painted MDF or melamine just to make a blank white space

if it is on the right coming towards you, and you are thinking of blanking it over.
have the units on the left as storage and use kitchen material to cut around the beam
this will keep your lines

In the little narrow bit it's on the right

So the middle short cupboard & the left short cupboard are unnecessarily short but th eleft one has to be short

If that makes sense? I get the feeling I'm not explaining this very well

.....the right one has to be short....

Is it the oven that is the middle of that back wall?- If so could you move the oven to the right hand side, shift the wall units so they are next door to each other, have the beam running along the ceiling across the oven and make a feature of it- e.g hang pots and pans/wild flowers/children's paintings off it

If it doesn't jut out further than the cupboards just have full height cupboards and get them to take out a chunk of the back of the right hand one to accommodate the now-hidden beam.

the right one will need to be a short wall then you can panel above.
the left side can be the same as the rest

The beam runs across the ceiling for the wall with the cooker/cupboards to the wall opposite

I'm a bit directionally challenged

I assume the beam was put in place prior to a wall being removed (knock through) into an extension. Depending on your budget (and it helps if you're detached) you could overcome the problem.

We recently did it (though we did it as part of an extension) by putting steel posts in the cavities (either side of the rsj (the beam)) and putting the beam level with the joists between the two floors (underneath the outer skin) A steel plate was then welded to the bottom of the beam in order to support the inner skin.

It cost serveral thousand pounds to do (Structural Engineers Fees came to a fair few thousand) was a lot of hassle and resulted in the foundation (between the original house and the extension) having to be reinforced (which cost another couple of thousand).

We now have an extension which runs straight through and looks (on the inside at least) as if it's part of the original house. Looks great, but I wouldn't pay that sort of money again and put up with the additional complexity and stress - We'd just live with the beams!

Almost it was a dining room & a 6 ft kitchen....so now it's a 17ft kitchen

I don't think we can afford that - so we will live with our beam

Good call.

full-length cupboard (from ceiling to worktop) might be the answer.

Maybe but I have floor to ceiling cupboards (all wall units) on the other side

& it would break up the worksurface nastily I think

if it's is making it look unbalanced you could balanced it by adding another fake beam on the other side to make it look like it's part of the design. or even lower the ceiling to encompass it if it leaves you enough head room still.

Maybe - does this one look better?

No - I can't block it as on the other wall the cupboards are up to the ceiling around it

ok. freestanding statement cooker hood in middle. open floating shelves either side and double wall cabinet each end!

The floorplan is here

I think the answer here (depending on you house and preferred style) is to 'hide' the pillar by contructing another one.

Before we embarked on the madness I described in my previous post, our architect had sought to retain the pilar on one side (like yours) and hide it by using it as one side of the canopy/chimney for the range cooker. It meant constructing the other side 1.2 metres away - but you can get smaller ranges. I think that would work.

Katy can you clear the beam with all the cupboards?

I had an extension built so had the beam in the ceiling.

This is the Ikea kitchen (not the greatest photos as it looks really dark and it isn't) so I had the 70cm wall cupboards rather than the 92cm)

It is not the best picture but like you have one shorter unit that doesn't reach the ceiling, we decided not to drop one cabinet down but drop all the cabinets down. Does that make sense?

I have grey larder cabinets either side of the fridge freezer, then the wall cabinets are white, the base cabinets are grey. So literally where the white wall cabinets start the beam is above the first white cabinet.

The other wall of the kitchen looks like this........

The other wall of the kitchen looks like this........

Katy what I was suggesting is that all your cabinets run underneath so you sacrifice the extra room you get by running the cabinets up to the ceiling.

So looking at your current kitchen, you just have less tall wall cabinets and the top of those cabinets are level with the bottom of the beam.

Just a thought.

At the end of the day your new kitchen is probably miles bigger than your current one so losing that extra bit of room may well be easy to accommodate.

They go up to the ceiling on the other side - so it might look odd

I'll have a think