What order does this work need to be tackled in?

[Lovecat]

Or am I just doomed to have no kitchen for months on end?

We have several long-standing problems with our kitchen and ground floor bathroom, and are now in a position to fix them, but I have a feeling that starting this work will be a bit like pulling at a loose thread and watching your jumper unravel completely...

I'm hoping the wise DIYers/project managers of MN can suggest which order the jobs should be done in, or if we're better off surrendering to chaos and gutting everything all at once.

We have a Victorian double-fronted terrace, and the layout is that the current kitchen, at the back of the house, used to be the morning room, and this opens onto a single storey lean-to that was the original kitchen of the house. This is now a bathroom, separated from the kitchen by a stud wall to create a vestibule area with a cupboard in it.

The cupboard contains a defunct chimney that runs down the back wall from the top of the house.

I have attached a badly-drawn floorplan if that is of use.

Problems:

1. The back wall of the house is damp - it was damp when we bought it 30 years ago, we had a damp course put in, it's been failing and being redone ever since, so just before lockdown we has a damp report done to try and establish the root cause of the damp. They suggested it was this chimney, because looking at it from ground level it doesn’t appear to be capped. We have no leaks that they could find.

1. The floor - we had the kitchen fitted in 1999 and at the time the floor was dodgy - part concrete, part floorboards, part chipboard nailed over the joists. The kitchen fitters poured about 3 lots of levelling compound onto it and laid vinyl flooring on top of it. About 10 years later there was a slow leak beneath the floor from the washing machine and the guy the insurers sent around to fix things replaced a few joists that had been damaged and laid a new tile-effect laminate floor. This was done around the units so they and the appliances are now effectively trapped by the 1cm higher-level flooring. The floor now feels "spongy" in one place where he didn't replace any joists, and completely in the vestibule area, so I think that this will need to be replaced as well.

Basically the whole floor needs replacing IMHO, I think it's beyond repair.

1. The (very solid, good quality, still going strong) oak units by the wall the sink is on (the other side of the wall the cupboard and chimney back onto) and countertop have sunk by about 1cm, most likely because of the damp in that wall, just enough to wedge the washing machine in there. We realised this because the washing machine has now broken and although we have it insured and have a replacement waiting to go in there, the bloody thing won't come out. Several large men have tried to no avail. Not without sawing through the units. And it's next to the sink unit, so if we do that, we'll have no sink.

1. The bathroom is manky and needs updating. Ideally I'd like to move back the stud wall and make it a shower room, giving enough space for a proper utility cupboard so that the new washing machine can go in there and the tumble dryer finally move out of the living room...

DH is not a DIYer at the best of times and has buried his head in the sand for the last god knows how long, telling me it's not that bad but has finally accepted that we need to raid the piggy bank and get the work done.

I just don’t know where to start, or which kind of contractor to call first - there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to fix the damp in the walls (and floor) without finding out if it is the semi-external chimney breast that's causing it, and much as I want to remove it entirely, I don’t know if that's a job for a structural engineer or if a builder could do it. And if a builder is what we need, or a flooring specialist or a carpenter/joiner...

I also don't know if we can save the units on the opposite wall or if everything is going to need to go 😫

All advice gratefully received...

Blimey! You have such a lot going on, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start. Just bumping in case someone knowledgeable comes along.

Re your chimney, our roofer that we’d called, due to what we thought was a leak a leak in our roof, told us our chimney needed pointing and that was why we had damp in our built in wardrobe. It was running down the chimney brickwork and in through the crumbling pointing, and then dripping down the internal wall. Tbf, a builder had redone some brickwork around our leaking patio door months earlier and said he could see our chimney needed repointing, we just never realised that it would be causing the internal damp, so maybe a roofer or a builder could have a look and see if they though the issue was your chimney? The builder would be able to give you a price for removal though.