Nearly every renovation we price has the same sentence in it somewhere. Can this wall go?
A couple of months back I was standing in a kitchen at Woonona with a client who had already decided the answer. Post-war brick, original layout, a kitchen closed off from the dining room by a wall with a doorway at one end. She wanted the whole thing out and one big room instead. Fair enough. It is the single most common thing anyone asks us to do to an older Illawarra house, and nine times out of ten it is the right call.
What I could not tell her that afternoon was what it would cost. Not because I was being cagey, but because the wall was plastered, the ceiling was intact, and everything that decides the price of that job was on the other side of it.
Working out whether the wall is holding anything up
There are two honest indicators and a lot of folklore.
The first is direction. Ceiling joists run one way across a house, and a wall running across them is a candidate for carrying them. A wall running parallel, sitting between joists, usually is not. If you have a manhole and a torch you can often see which way the framing runs in ten minutes, and that alone will tell you whether to be worried.
The second is what sits above and below. A wall with a beam, a strut or a row of roof framing landing on its top plate is doing a job. A wall with a pier, a solid footing or a bearer underneath it was built to carry weight, and nobody puts a footing under a wall for fun.
Beyond that, be sceptical of anything you read. Internal brick walls in a brick-veneer house are not automatically structural. External-looking walls are not automatically load-bearing either, though in a full brick house they usually are. And the one that catches people most often: a wall added later, that looks like an afterthought, can still have been pressed into service as a prop when somebody else did their own renovation twenty years ago and never told anyone.
The only way to be certain is to open up. We cut an inspection hole in the ceiling and look, before quoting rather than after, because a number given without that is a guess dressed up as a price.
What the engineer actually gives you
Assuming the wall is carrying something, the fix is not complicated in concept. The wall's job gets handed to a beam, and the beam's job gets handed to a support at each end, and those supports have to land on something that can take the load all the way down to the ground.
An engineer sizes that. What they need to know is the span, what is above, and what the roof does in wind, and they will specify the beam, the connections at each end, and what happens underneath those ends. Sometimes that is straightforward. Sometimes the load lands over a section of floor with nothing useful under it and a new pier or pad footing has to go in, which means the floor comes up.
The structural provisions all of this sits under are in NCC 2025 Volume Two, and the engineer's certificate is what the certifier wants to see. This is not a part of the job to improvise. I have been in houses where somebody's brother-in-law put a lintel in and it has been sagging quietly ever since, and the plaster cracking above the opening is how you find out.
One design decision worth making early: whether the beam gets hidden in the ceiling or left below it. Hiding it costs more, because the framing above has to be reworked around it. Dropping it and making a feature of it is cheaper and, in a room with a bit of height, often looks better than a flat ceiling with nothing in it. We price both when the gap between them is worth knowing about.
Where the money actually goes
Here is the part that surprises people. The beam is rarely the expensive line.
The cost lives in four places. Propping the structure temporarily while the wall is out, which is a day or two of careful work and a lot of gear. The supports at each end and whatever has to happen under them. The services that were living inside the wall. And making good afterwards.
That third one is the wildcard. Kitchen walls in particular are full of things. Waste pipe, water, gas, a switchboard sometimes, and in a house that has been renovated before, the wiring for half the back of the house. All of it has to go somewhere else, and there is no way to know what is in there until the linings come off. Two walls that look identical from the kitchen side can be thousands apart because one had a stack in it and one did not.
Making good gets underestimated too. When the wall goes, you are left with a line across the ceiling where the cornice met it, a line across the floor where the covering stopped, and two wall junctions that need patching. If the floors are timber and continue through, the strip where the wall sat has to be pieced in and the whole floor sanded so it reads as one room. If they are tiled, you are usually retiling the lot.
None of that is a reason not to do it. It is a reason to have it priced properly rather than discovering it in week two. I have written more about how these jobs run in how long a renovation takes, and the broader budget side in renovation costs in the Illawarra.
It still needs approval
This catches people, because nothing about the outside of the house changes and it feels like an internal job.
Structural work is not exempt development in NSW. Taking out a load-bearing wall needs an approval pathway, either a complying development certificate through a private certifier or a development application through council, depending on the work and the property. CDC vs DA in NSW runs through what changes between the two.
The contract side is worth knowing as well. The NSW Government's page on contracts for residential building work sets it out plainly: a written contract is required once the price is over $5,000 including GST, jobs between $5,000 and $20,000 need a small job contract, and anything over $20,000 needs a large job contract with a five clear business day cooling-off period and home building compensation cover. Your deposit cannot exceed 10 per cent of the contract price. A wall removal on its own might sit under the small job threshold. Folded into the renovation it usually belongs to, it will not.
When the wall is not the real problem
Worth saying, because we talk people out of this occasionally.
Sometimes the reason a house feels closed in is not the wall. It is that the room behind it has one small window facing south and taking the wall out just gives you a bigger dark room. Opening up works when there is light on the other side of it to borrow. When there is not, the money does more as glazing, or as a modest addition off the back that brings in a north or east aspect. Ground-floor extension ideas covers what that usually looks like, and our home extensions page covers how we run one.
The Woonona kitchen, for what it is worth, was fine. Joists ran across it, so it was carrying. There was a waste pipe in it we had to reroute and a pier to put in under one end of the beam, and we hid the beam because the ceilings were low enough that dropping it would have felt oppressive. It took about three weeks all up and it is now one room with the afternoon light coming right through to the front.
She asked me afterwards why nobody had done it decades ago. No good answer to that one. Half the houses around here were drawn when a kitchen was somewhere you worked on your own, and the wall was the whole point.
If you are looking at a wall and wondering, that is the conversation we have at the first visit. We will get up into the ceiling and tell you what is actually going on before anyone talks about a number. Call 0434 037 851 or send the details through the contact page, and our home renovations page covers how we run the rest of it.
Common questions
- How do you tell if a wall is load-bearing?
- The reliable indicators are direction and support. A wall running across the ceiling joists rather than parallel to them is more likely carrying them, and a wall with something solid under it in the subfloor and something sitting on it in the roof is almost certainly structural. None of that is proof. The only way to be sure is to open up the ceiling and look at which way the framing runs and what is bearing on the top plate, which is why we do that before quoting rather than after.
- Can you remove a load-bearing wall?
- Nearly always, yes. A load-bearing wall is not a wall that cannot be removed, it is a wall whose job has to be given to something else, usually a beam sized by an engineer and supported at both ends down to something that can carry it. The question is never whether it can go. It is what the replacement structure costs and where the new supports land.
- Do you need council approval to remove an internal wall?
- Structural work is not exempt development in NSW, so removing a load-bearing wall needs an approval pathway even though nothing about the outside of the house changes. Depending on the work it runs as a complying development certificate through a private certifier or a development application through council. Your certifier or council confirms which applies to your job.
- Does a beam have to be exposed, or can it sit in the ceiling?
- Either, and it is a cost decision as much as a design one. Hiding the beam inside the ceiling line means the framing above has to be reworked around it, which is more labour. Leaving it exposed or dropping it below the ceiling is cheaper and can look deliberate if the rest of the room is detailed to suit. We price both when the difference is worth knowing.
- What does it cost to remove a load-bearing wall?
- The beam itself is usually the smaller line. The cost sits in the temporary propping while the wall is out, the new supports at each end and whatever has to be done underneath them, relocating any plumbing, wiring or ducting that was living in the wall, and making good the ceiling, cornice and floor where the wall used to be. Two identical-looking walls can be thousands apart depending on what is inside them.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0434 037 851.