I am in an old local authority property and have two old pantry cupboards (joined) in the kitchen which I would like to remove to provide more room for a fitted kitchen. As local authority houses are fairly well built these cupboards have solid brick walls.
Two questions:
1) How likely are these cupboards to be supporting walls?
2) How do I find out if there are or not? (don't say knock them down please!)
Pic 1 is outer view of cupboards:
Pic 2 is up inside view:
Does it really require the skills of an engineer to determine whether something is load bearing or not?
I've had experience of a very similar scenario; also ex-LA, also with two brick cupboards in the kitchen, and which I wanted to remove.
You need to lift enough floorboards in the rooms above to find out what's going on. In my case, I found that one of the walls had clearly been built as an after-thought, there were no joists over it, and I could see right along the gap between the floor joists over the cupboard (ie no evidence at all of the wall beneath). In fact once I'd removed the wall below I discovered that the plasterboard ceiling within the cupboard was continuous with the plasterboard over the rest of the ceiling which was a bonus. However, the second wall (more of a pier, really, as it formed an extension to the alcove adjacent to the chimney breast) was a different matter: one floor joist was obviously being held up by the brick pier below. In order to safely remove that wall, some jiggery-pokery was needed using metal joist hangers and a trimmer joist.
So the message must be: take care! They might not be load-bearing, but they might be. If in any doubt at all, 100 quid or so paid to a structural engineer would be very small beer compared to the consequences if you get it wrong.
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