Remove chimney breast in middle of house

[Mollyeyes]

Hello
Anyone done this or know how much it cost to remove chimney breast downstairs and upstairs in between rooms? Is it a big job? Removing between lounge and dining room and upstairs between two main bedrooms.
Thank you

We did it but as part of a whole house renovation so I couldn’t tell you how much it cost.

Made a big difference as we could have a slightly bigger bathroom.

Ours is a early 1960s house and it was a big job - then had to chisel it out brick by brick! It was very solid.

Delighted we did it though 👍

Floor plan attached- see the boxes

I have or at least my builders have , again I cannot give individual cost as it was part of a complete renovation , two large chimneys in a 1962 double hip bungalow, freed up loads of room and they were taken down from the top downwards with building control checks as part of the re-figuration . Would do it again .

We did, about 8 or 9 years ago. Think we paid about £5k ex VAT for the work.

@Africa2go

We did, about 8 or 9 years ago. Think we paid about £5k ex VAT for the work.

Same roughly, for one breast downstairs and then a steel beam putting in. The steel was most of the cost.

It's at least a skip's worth of bricks.
Is the end still on the roof? Because that will have to come off too with nothing to support it underneath.

@Africa2go 5k for all the chimney breasts in the house or just one?

We too are looking to have the chimney breast removed, we will just do it downstairs, as that will mean we don't need to worry about the actual chimney on the roof needing to be removed.

Op use Mybuilder and you may be able to get quotes from someone local to you, I've asked on there and haven't got a response yet!

@ruby4ever it was just the chimney breast that was in the middle of the house (its a 30s house & was chimney breast between kitchen and dining room (and above), we still have chimney breast in front sitting room and front bedroom etc). We removed it all the way through the house and the load bearing walls, didn't need a steel.

We are thinking of doing this too, though planning on leaving it in place in first floor. It's a massive structure to remove because we are taking out the structural wall around it too. Expecting it to be a lot more than £5k!!!

It will be more expensive if you're only taking it out downstairs because you have to support the upper floors/load bearing walls. I think if we did it now it would probably be upwards of £10k plus VAT

@rubyforever, if you only have the downstairs removed, surely that will be considerably more expensive because something will have to be put in to support the chimney breast in the upper floor? I would have thought you can’t just leave the upper chimney breast hanging with no support. I’m sure someone posted on here about buying a house and finding that had occurred (only the lower chimney breast removed) and having to spend a fortune fixing it because it was extremely dangerous and could come crashing into the ground floor at any moment.

@Talia99 ahh I haven't been able to get any quotes, didn't realise it'll cost more just to take one out. I am aware it will need support if only the downstairs got taken out. I've watched a few renovations on YouTube and had seen builders only removing one and putting support in. The reason why we don't want all of them taken out is, we are living in the house so would get extremely messy

I removed the ground floor level only and had to put two steel beams in plus steel columns to support the floor above. I think it was £6k about 8 years ago (southeast). Yes it was a very messy job - old Victorian.

We had ours removed from bottom to top. Like others, can't tell you exact cost as it was part of renovations, but 2 men did it in under a week.
One thing I can tell you is it's very messy. They took the top off first and retiled that bit of roof. Then they went into the attic and removed that bit and all the bricks and rubble came out through the loft hatch, then down through the bedroom (which was out of action for quite a while) and on down into the sitting room. The dust, rubble and bricks were horrific. Turned out there were also a load of pipes from an old back boiler in the chumney breast.

We have just had a load bearing wall including chimney removed, just the downstairs part, cost £10K of which £2500 was the steels.

@ruby4ever We had an extension a couple of years after removing the chimney breast - involved taking the back of the house off etc.. But none of that was as messy as removing the chimney breast.

For us, as I said upthread, it is a 30s house and it was the chimney breast between the kitchen and dining room - so presume it had genuinely been used for cooking back in the day. Not only did it produce masses of brick dust and debris, everywhere was covered in soot - a thick black layer of black soot that got through all of the sealing and just seemed to coat everything, it was grim. We were also living in the house, it was probably the worst couple of weeks of any housing work we've ever done. Worth it in the end but be prepared!!

Ask yourself is it worth the trouble. I have removed just the fireplace (and all the infill that backs it up) from three Victorian houses and increased the floor area considerably in each case without having to do expensive structural work. (I'm still living in one of the houses 30 years after doing this and the other two houses are still standing.) The fireplace, surrounds, and all the stuff behind the actual fireplace are not structural. There will be a relieving arch or lintel built into the wall. I just plasterboarded the inside of the fireplace and capped the chimneys and made sure there was a vent to the chimney void in each room.

It's a messy job but well within the average DIYer's competence.

We removed a large chimney breast in an old cottage - massive stone inglenook. Cost us £11k and involved structural engineers, three steels and lots of mess. Make sure you get building regs too in case you want to sell your property.

it's huge structural work.
often the fireplace is an integral part holding up the house and part of the roof.
you need a surveyor to have a look. almost definitely will need building reg approval. planning permission if the building is listed.
we got a quote about 5 years ago to remove the stack cellar to roof, steel braces, new roof in that area only, making good and finishing touches (plastering only). 15-20k for one 3 story chimney.

we spontaneously decided to just close the chimneys off

We've just done this as part of a larger renovation - removed it right down from the stack to the ground floor. There was a minor disaster as the back of the chimney breast tied into the bathroom wall behind and that wall came down when the breast was coming out so they had to rebuild the wall. Make sure your builder know to call the Structural Engineer as soon as they run into any issues as our SE says they could have propped it better. Dust was unbelievable.

Not sure of exact cost as it's tied into everything else, but I think £8k-10k including roof patching. Worth doing for us though as it's enabled a loft extension, bigger kitchen and more space in bedroom.

Thank you everyone for your advice and sharing your experiences, the cost, mess and structural problems we may encounter scares me!!I think would be wise we won’t go ahead. We won’t buy this house.

Just moved out for 3 months whilst our house was renovated including taking down massive chimney breast. Luckily the council let us take down the stack too or it would have been a major expense shoring up the floors to support it.
We paid an overall figure of £77k to do the whole house including moving bathroom, creating cloakroom, extending a bedroom,rewiring, plumbing, outdoor paving and total redecorating.
Looks totes amazeballs now 😬
Worth it!

The idea that removing a chimney breast without involving a structural engineer is terrifying. The weight of chimneys goes into the ground. The weight must then be held by beams and deflected into the ground. It is not something a DIYer can do and, for a big job, a builder shouldn’t tackle it on their own.

@TheSandman
Currently we have removed the fireplaces and blocked off the chimney. So nothing structural. The chimney breast is there. We had the wall boarded off, plastered and painted. Where did you put the vent? Our plasterer left a small gap at the bottom saying that's the vent, but that will get covered when we put the skirting on, is it fine that it will
Be blocked off? Why is the vent needed, when the fireplace is no longer used?

We were planning on removing the chimney breast in the main lounge just to make it bigger, but now I think we will leave it, I've had enough dust to deal with, with smaller jobs in the house. And didn't realise it costs a lot of money, will just live with the big breast 😆

When you said 'removed the fireplaces' did you end up with a big rectangular void going into the wall under the breast? (Like my bad picture there of the one at one end of my house. That void was big enough to get a Rayburn stove in. We're working on getting a replacement.)

Or did you just take the front off?

Either way the vent is really needed because there is a now huge hole inside your house (which you have plaster-boarded over. If you didn't have a vent in the plasterboard it would get damp backthere and, a few years down the road, you'd be looking at dry rot and all sorts of other problems. A small vent is all that's needed just to allow some slight air flow. The vent needs to be above the skirting and preferably not have a piece of heavy solid furniture shoved up against it.

@PresentingPercy - depends on the chimney breast (and how you define competent DIYer). I can see you'd need a structural engineer to take a look at a stack that was shared - as in a semi - but I removed a free standing chimney stack from my detached house (I suppose I should have got planning permission thinking about it) by building a chute down the roof (out of old timbers and corrugated iron sheets whacked together with 6" nails) and just throwing the thing down block by block. (Granite blocks not bricks.) Took an afternoon, and closed the roof over the next day. The fireplace (two storeys down) was emptied. I got a little erfy when I spotted the old stone lintel had cracked but it was simple enough to knock out some of the rubble wall above it, lay a reinforced concrete lintel on top and refill. I was tempted to put an arch in too but in the end decided that was overkill.