How Much Does It Cost To Remove a Chimney Breast?



Stacks Image 173950




Cost to Remove a Chimney Breast





job
Description
labour
1You want to take out a bedroom chimney breast in your 1930 semi. That means a simple gallows bracket in the loft. There’s no ceiling coving, he will lay a new concrete hearth that will be level with the floor and he’s only plaster “patching” the ceiling. There’s no wall or ceiling paper to remove before plastering and he will fit a new skirting right across the whole wall. You will do the decorating and will have cleared the room for him. He is “skipping” the carpet because it will have a hearth shaped hole in it. All the rubbish is being bagged up and passed out of the window to Dave who will take it straight to the skip on the driveway. This will take 2 men 3 days
£825

Plus materials, 2 lots of professional fees, the skip etc. for the above
£800
2Same job in the dining room. He will have to support the bottom bricks of the bedroom breast properly. This will take 2 men 3 days
£825

Plus materials, 2 lots of professional fees, the skip etc. for the above
£800
3To do the the whole job in one go, leaving only the stack in the loft. This will take 5 days.
£1450

Plus materials, 2 lots of professional fees, the skip etc. for the above
£900
4If he is removing /returning furniture, stripping loads of wallpaper so that he can plaster, etc. you must expect to pay at least one more day’s money.
 £275

“Labour” at £175 a day (tradesman) £100 (labourer), includes incidental fixings etc. and tipping charges. “Materials” if mentioned, are larger things (a boiler) and stuff only you can choose (tiles etc).  Also VAT must be added all round.

Information Sheet on Removing a Chimney Breast


Removing a chimney breast is a dirty job, but the smaller your home the more you will benefit from the increased space providing you are certain that you never want a proper fire of any kind ever again.

Also you have to consider resale value. An otherwise well preserved Victorian house may not appeal to so many buyers if half the fireplaces are gone. They may be looking for original features.

If you’re still convinced, here is a bit of background knowledge and a few tips to help you understand what will be involved, before you contact your builder for a discussion and a quotation.

Firstly, it will avoid confusion if you get the terminology right:

The Chimney and its Associated Parts

Chimney     The whole brick construction from ground floor to sky.
Breast     The part of the chimney that you can see in each room.
Hearth     The floor of the “fireplace” which usually extending into the room.  This will be paved with hard, fireproof material such as slate, a flagstone or concrete.
Flue     The tube inside the chimney which carries the smoke and heat out of the house. This is usually square and you won’t be able to see it. Each hearth has its own flue.
Stack     The part of the chimney in the loft and the bit that projects above the roof.
Pot     An earthenware or metal tube at the top of the stack. It narrows the aperture and increases the updraft to disperse the smoke. The number of pots on top of a stack should equal the number of hearths in the house. If not, you have either lost one, or had a hearth removed or blocked up. Maybe even more than one!

Characteristics of Chimneys

Detached Houses
These tend to have their chimneys at the sides of their roofs. Every now and then there’s one in the middle but this is usually a Victorian kitchen chimney.
The point about the position of the chimney is relevant. You can’t just go ahead and remove a bedroom breast in a standard detached house because the brickwork above it will fall down. 

Semi-Detached Houses and Terraced Houses.

If you live in a semi-detached house built from the 1930s onwards, the chimneys for each of the pair of houses will probably back onto one another. It is likely that both sets of front and rear room breasts will converge in the attic and emerge as one stack in the centre of the roof. Once again, each hearth has its own flue and at no point will any of the flues connect with each other.

Given this scenario, in theory it should be safe to remove a bedroom chimney breast because the combination of the party wall which divides the two houses and the corresponding chimney breast in the neighbour’s house, constitute a very solid mass of brickwork which is self-supporting. Similarly, you could probably remove a ground floor breast without anything untoward happening to the bedroom breast above.

However, just because a thing is possible, it doesn’t mean that it is sensible or legal!

Building Regulations

It is essential that you inform and involve a Building Control Officer before beginning to remove any chimney breast.

Your builder will need to support any breast or stack above the breast you want him to remove. This is because Building Control have a more cautious and longer term view than the average builder. They need to know that nothing will fall down if your neighbour also decides to removed a chimney breast.

Depending on the circumstances, there are several options available to your builder to ensure that other stacks above the one to be removed are adequately supported. Your builder should be able to explain which option is best for you.

Neighbours

Your neighbour will want a party wall agreement, which will protect him from incurring costs resulting from mistakes or miscalculations made by your builder. This could get very expensive indeed if a dispute arises, but if you have a mutually agreeable document signed by both parties and you have taken advice from both your builder and the Building Control officer, problems will be much less likely to occur. 

If it all seems a bit unnecessary, just think how you would feel if the boot were on the other foot. If you get on well with your neighbour, all well and good, but if not, then having everything down in writing may be even more important. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway!), it’s better to keep the lines of communication open from the start.
Also, be mindful of how the noise and vibration may affect them. They won’t be best pleased if they come home from work and all their decorative Spanish plates and little glass bambis have been vibrated off the shelf by your builder’s Kango hammer. I’ve also known tiling fly off neighbour’s walls. It may be necessary to remove the bricks in a gentler manner!

An interesting fact about flues

When constructed, each flue was rendered internally. This meant smearing the mortar with which they were laying the bricks, all over the inside faces of the flue as they went along. Unfortunately, in Victorian houses particularly, a hundred years of smoke and sweeping quite often causes the render to deteriorate. This, combined with a bit of movement, can sometimes allow smoke to pass between the bricks and emerge in an adjacent flue. In shared chimneys, this could be from your neighbour’s flue!

Questions to ask the builder during his quotation visit.
How do you intend to remove the ton of bricks and soot safely out of our bedroom?
How will you prevent dust and soot permeating into every fibre of the house?
Who will consult with the neighbours?
Will you organise building control involvement?
Who will be doing the plastering after the breast is removed?
You will have to get the wall re-decorated or painted, but will want it to be smooth and flush with the original wall. You may want to consider having the whole wall re-plastered.

What about skirting boards?
You should get the skirting board replaced across the whole wall. Not just a patch. Ask if he will be able to source the same style of skirting as the rest of the room. If not, you will probably want the whole room re-skirting. 

How will you make good my ceiling (and my coving)?
The same considerations apply. 

Will the floor of the hearth need re-laying so it is flush with the rest of the floor?
You won’t want a ridge to show if you are planning to lay new carpet.

Appendix
So, how will your builder support what’s above? If it’s the stack in the loft he has to support, that’s relatively easy. He can buy a couple of gallows brackets.

This is where one bracket is fixed on each side of the loft stack and a length of steel is fixed between them and then, any brick which feels like dropping …can’t. 

Supporting a breast left “hanging” in the bedroom should usually be possible by utilising the adjacent joists. The ones on either side of the breast should be thicker than the rest, because they have been supporting the ones that were directly in front of the breast. A noggin (bit of wood) can be fitted and a sheet of ply fixed under the breast then everything filled in. This creates no more weight than the old hearth and the breast was never going to fall anyway and the odd bottom brick that might have done…. can’t.

On larger jobs (loft conversions for instance) where chimney brickwork may have to become load bearing, brackets are no good and steel beams will be used but that’s another story (and another storey)!


FAQs 'traffic light' guide



www.buildingsheriff.com
Copyright The Building Sheriff Ltd 2017