Summer Terrace - Day 10 - making a room bigger

**Disclaimer - it really isn't day 10 - this project is taking a really long time.**

Todays activity has followed weeks of estimates, misunderstandings, despair and frustration.

As you can see from these photos, there was a chimney breast running up the back corner of the house, originally from the kitchen right up to a chimney.  During previous work before I bought the house, the chimney breast had been removed from the kitchen, leaving it up through the 2 upper floors.  

 

My original plan was to remove the chimney and chimney breasts right through, as most other houses in the row had done.  It turns out I had underestimated the cost of this, this is something I hadn't done before so my cost was an educated guess and turned out to be about 1/3 of the prices I have been quoted.  I had to decide to either go over budget or make a compromise.

I decided on the compromise.  As the chimney is structurally fine and not leaking, I decided to leave that (save on the scaffolding costs) and as the chimney breast on the top floor is quite small because of the pitch of the roof I decided to leave that too.  However, the chimney breast in the other bedroom, although not huge (about 35cm x 80cm) took up a lot of useful space in terms of furniture arrangement, so I wanted to take that out.  I also couldn't see for sure that it had been safely supported when the chimney breast was removed from the kitchen underneath.

So the upper chimney breast was propped up and the demolition could begin,  it turned out it was a double chimney breast so there was an unexpected extra row of bricks and went out to the outer skin of bricks meaning it needed bricking back up afterwards.

So here it is, bricked up, floor replaced and steel in place ready to be boarded and plastered.

Steel plate in detail

I've found this particular job really frustrating for a few reasons, firstly because it was so expensive for what it achieved and also because I feel like any other developed would have left it as furniture position isn't their problem and buyers probably wouldn't realise the potential issues until they had moved in.  That just doesn't sit right with my conscience, but it impacts my bottom line.

In the end, I am happy with my decision, it definitely makes the bedroom more usable, and feel a bit bigger.  I am also confident that it is now properly supported (the previous support looked a little dubious).

Back to work now - no doubt there will be more tough decisions ahead...