Removing kitchen wall - what to do?

[Locsup183]

Hoping for a bit of help!

Just moved into a house and we’d like to knock down a load bearing wall between kitchen and dining room if possible. Wall contains electrics and radiators.

We’ve never done this before - what’s the order of people you approach to find out if it’s feasible? Structural engineer? Builder? Plumber? Electrician? Anyone else?

Quite a minor building work I guess but my head is spinning. I salute all of you who have done major renovations!

I have done this recently and got the person drawing the plans out first. He arranged the structural engineer for me. Builders wouldn't come out and look at the job or give prices until they knew what beam etc was needed. Plumbers/electricians just slot in once the builder is in place. They'll probably have contacts that they can use to save you giving to organise them separately.

I did this. The structural engineer drew the plans and did the calculations first. Then we got quotes from builders who had a umber and electrician who worked for them.

It will definitely be possible, the only question is how much it will cost and if you’re prepared to pay that much. As it’s load bearing you’ll need to put steel in but depending on your structure that could just be one beam or could be a four sided “picture-frame beam” set into the floor which gets quite expensive.

Ask around locally until you’ve got a recommendation for 3 builders. (Maybe also call the local buildings regulations department and ask if they can suggest any names of builders/ structural engineers who don’t usually cause problems. My building regs inspector was all “why didn’t you come to us first, we could have suggested someone better”.)

Give the builders a call and say you’ve got a job you’d love them to quote for, you assume they need structural drawings before they can quote, and is there anyone they can suggest to do the drawings?

Forget about plumber and electrician, builder will sort those, and you want him to, because they’ll work much harder for a repeat customer like him than they will for you.

Thanks so much everyone! Really helpful!

We have just had this done. Just called builders. We didn't have plans, just had builders round and described what we wanted. They came back with a quote and sorted all the plumbing, electrics and structural engineering themselves.