Knocking through hallway

[Jrg128]

We are thinking of knocking through our hallway to create a large open plan kitchen diner - so on the attached floor plan we would knock through the utility room and study and the right hand hallway wall. I know we would need to get supporting beams and have thought about potential issues with noise and smells from the kitchen. Just wondered if anybody else has done similar or anybody got any thoughts on whether this is a good idea. Thanks!

@NothingIsWrong yes that was our original plan, I think we might be best off doing that, it doesn’t give us a huge amount of extra room but it would open it up a bit

How about like this? Keeps the hallway to provide the protected stairwell, red are the likely structural beams needed - you have light coming from both ends, and you could also look at moving the side door to make the space more useable?

Anyway, whatever you do, you will need either an architect or an architectural technician to do the plans. A good one will have lots of ideas to offer and should be able to work with whatever budget you have.

I reckon adjusting a soil pipe is a much more solvable problem than needing that much steel to keep the house standing up!

Not an architect or an engineer though, they’ll be able to look at all the options for you.

Moving bathroom waste really isn't that difficult. I'd be concerned with your plan that by removing the utility and study you'll devalue your property.

From a structural point of view, your plan removes a significant number of walls, and would require beams and also probably columns which then need new foundations. Starts to get very expensive at that point

Not that we opened up a lot of walls but when I had my kitchen extension they wanted to hold up the back part of the upstairs with a steel, obviously, but what I didn't want was for it to rest on a brick column as that would impact my run of units. Instead they put in a vertical steel in the wall which the horizontal steel sat on. As it is in the wall it already sat on foundations so no new foundations needed, just a small concrete pad on the top.

Just worth a thought when they start talking about columns needed for the steel.

We used to have an open plan kitchen/diner/living that was a similar shape to what you would get if you knocked through to the dining room and blocked up the double doors to the living room from the dining room. It worked fantastically well for zoning the space. We did a very small side and rear extension to the kitchen bit (so an L shape, probably only gained a metre each way internally).

Thanks everyone, going to get a couple more architects out to chat through our options!