Removing walls to open the living space or building walls to create more rooms.

A house can be converted without extending it. But some clients ask for doing both: converting and also extending their houses.

House conversion is a lot about changing the internal space layout:

  • Move a wall,
  • Remove a wall,
  • Make a wall,
  • Remove a chimney breast,

But can be also about opening the house to the exterior with doors and windows:

  • Open a gap in the wall to put a door.
  • Put a window in the roof
  • Replace a wall between the living room and the garden, for a glass door.
  • Add a window to a wall.

Depending on the change required, house conversions usually need an Engineering drawing, to ensure compliance with building regulations. This Plan frequently includes the use of steal beams to support the weight of the house in the areas when a load bearing wall is removed.

 

Incorporate the garage space into the house

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This garage for example gave a big extra space to the living room.

We needed to remove the wall between the living room and the garage, and also, we needed to remove the roof of the garage to make their walls higher and get the roof at the same level than the rest of the ground floor.

It was quite an interesting project, so we wrote a webpage about it here.

Join the kitchen and the living room space

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This project needed us to remove several internal walls.

We put the planned beams in to support the house where the walls were removed.

It was all done according to the engineering drawings and approved by the building inspection.

The result was a quite spacious family living space.

 

Moving a wall to make the bathroom bigger

Convert a bathroom by moving a wall, to make it smaller if it was too big; or to make it bigger if it was too small is very common request.

Here they wanted to fit a bath in the bathroom and they didn’t have enough space.

We moved the right hand side wall further right to do it.
We also wrote a webpage about this bathroom fitting here.

Remove utility room to give more space to the living room

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In the above project, we removed the old utility room (3×3=9m2).

We removed 2 walls of it and replaced them with supporting beams according to the engineering drawings.

The space freed up was used to install a shower (1m2). To put the washing machine and drier (1m2)– vertically stacked– facing the opposite room. To make a storage cabinet around the boiler (1m2),  and finally  to give extra space to the living room (2x3m2).

This is just a part of a big house conversion & renovation project detailed here.

 

Removing a Chimney Breast

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Several customers ask us to remove the chimney breast to free up a wall.

For the project above, we removed the chimney breast in the 1st floor main bedroom and installed a wall-to-wall wardrobe instead.

Removing this chimney required us to install supporting gallows-brackets in the loft to hold the chimney weight as you can see in the photos.

Afterwards, we re-plastered & painted-and-decorated the bedroom wall before installing the wall-to-wall wardrobe.

Build a bathroom under stairs

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In the project above we built a bathroom under stairs. Even with a shower built in 1m2 taken from the side room.

Have a look at the photos; it is the typical space under the stairs in Oxford’s houses, and it seemed small, but it perfectly fitted a close-fit-toilet seat and a small sink.

The white tiles, paint, spot lights and mirror made the bathroom look spacious.

This is just a part of a big house conversion & renovation project detailed here.

 

Open a wall to make an internal door to the extension storage room

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Here we opened this wall and fitted a sliding barn door because the space was too small for traditional doors to be opened.

Build an internal wall to create an extra room

We built this internal wall as you can see above, using timber studs and plasterboard panels to create an extra room in the house.

 

Fitting a window on the roof

 

Yes, 1 or 2 windows would add natural light to any room.

Fitting a window is a common request in a loft or in an extension.

The ideal is to have the windows inclined and south facing to be sure the most of the sun light.

Also, depending on the roof space, a loft can become a room without need of any changes to the roof structure but just fitting a window on it. See our webpage about loft conversions here.

Fitting a glass door to see the garden from inside the house

Wide glass doors are now very in demand. Clients have asked us to install them to have a view of the garden from the kitchen or living room.

Also it increases the natural light inside the house, and today glass doors are quite well insulated, you just have to keep them closed in winter.