Renovations – week 6 (Lowering the first floor ceiling)

Ceiling height

Something we hadn’t realised about converting the loft of a Victorian terrace (and hadn’t come up in our conversations with the architect, structural engineer or surveyors) is that sometimes there isn’t enough head height. This revelation from the builders caught us out as both the ground and first floors had such high ceilings and the loft appeared on first glance to be equally ample. Turns out it wasn’t however this is not always the case and the other end of the street with very slightly bigger houses had not had their ceilings lowered to add a loft.

Our experience

So the other day, the builder notified that us that having added the necessary steel beams across the width of the house to provide load bearing support for the new floor, the new height would be insufficient for building regs sign off and lower than the 2m required. When Chris is 1.91meters tall, this isn’t ideal and we didn’t particularly want to design a hobbit hole for when we came to sell either (having seen this decision having been made and the result elsewhere).

Initial steel beam position

Not quite sure how this came to be (whether it was an assumption on the drawings that the floor would be lowered) but turns out this was necessary. The image above shows the initial positioning of the steel beam which sits as an additional floor above the existing ceiling which is unable to support the weight. So the ceilings from the first floor came down. Unfortunately we’d stacked half our lives in the front bedroom thinking they would be well out of the way (lol..) and couldn’t make it back to the house quick enough so the builders moved everything to the third bedroom for us. To be fair they did a pretty good job of relocating a fairly stacked rooms’ belongings quickly.

There was a brief panic when we thought the builders had already rebuilt the floors 25cm below the original ceiling and thought this would look pretty odd if there was no space over the windows. But fortunately they hadn’t and Chris went over and thought dropping by 10cm would look fine so confirmed to go ahead.

What a first floor looks like with no ceiling…
Chris measuring what ceiling height would look sensible

If not built into the plan, this does take a little longer as involves removing all the existing ceiling (including any original coving which we were sad about) and floor joists in order to lay the steel beams further down and recreate a ceiling but hopefully the end result will be worth it and we can reestablish the coving (given the house had literally nothing else saved when we bought it).

This is as far as we’ve gotten at this point..

 

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