The Project: Victorian Reno – Part 2

At the end of last year, I began work on a renovation project in a Victorian residential property. Since the initial brief I’ve had a few more meetings with the client, and while the wheels are in motion, we haven’t quite begun the main body of work yet.

Due to the nature of the renovation, there is a lot of structural work to be done. The property was converted into three flats, and then converted back into a single household, and there is an unused staircase and front door that acted as an access point for the upstairs flats. This will be taken out to make way for a larger kitchen on the ground floor, and an additional bathroom on the first floor.

This will involve the removal of walls etc, and so we enlisted the help of a structural engineer to advise us. Unfortunately, the work to convert the original property into three flats was carried out poorly, and some of the walls we were hoping to remove are supporting, making them integral to the structural security of the house.

Faced with the possibility of more extensive and expensive work to make our original plans a reality, we have decided to explore other configurations to keep the cost of the project as low as we can. The remodelling is part of a wider project to restore the house, as there are is a lot of redecoration to do too, so we need to make sure that there is money in our budget for this too.

The client has also recently met an architect who has offered to visit the property and lend their expertise. Our next step is to work on some different layouts and run them by our architect and structural engineer to ensure that we can proceed safely with the project.

Stay tuned!