GS Renovation opens up East Barnet homes, joining the small rear rooms of Victorian terraces near the village into one kitchen and dining space, and knocking through the compartmented ground floors of the interwar semis around it. With over 30 years of structural work in EN4, we prop and beam and certify every opening properly, then hand over the paperwork at the end.
Opening up a Victorian terrace near East Barnet Village
The terraces near the village have a familiar plan: two small rooms front and back, then a narrower rear addition holding the original scullery. The popular scheme joins the back reception to that addition and takes the side return into the room, which gives a genuinely wide kitchen out of two cramped spaces. It is more structural work than it looks. You are usually removing part of a load-bearing internal wall and the flank of the rear addition, which means a beam, sometimes two picking up on a post, all designed by the engineer we appoint.
Floor levels are the detail that gets forgotten. The original rear addition of an EN4 terrace often sits a step down from the main house, or has been rebuilt in concrete against a suspended timber floor elsewhere, so once the wall between them is gone you have two floors at different heights and a single kitchen sitting across both. We level with a screed or a ply overlay before anything is laid, so the finished floor runs through in one plane. The same applies to the ceiling line, which rarely matches either.
Heat, noise and sign off in EN4
One big room behaves differently from three small ones. The radiators that used to be on the wall you removed have gone, the volume to heat has grown, and a solid walled Victorian terrace loses heat faster than the cavity built semis further out, so the heating needs rebalancing and often resizing rather than reconnecting. Cooking noise and smells travel too, which is why extract matters more in an open plan kitchen than a closed one. We plan the duct run to an outside wall at design stage, not once the units are in.
The structural side is controlled under the Building Regulations, so Barnet Council building control or an approved inspector reviews the calculations and inspects the beam bearings before they are covered. Planning permission does not come into an internal reconfiguration. Where the opening reaches the wall shared with next door, or a beam bears into it, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 applies and notice is served by you before we begin. Fire and escape also get a look in an open plan house, particularly where the stair now opens directly into the kitchen.
- Knock-throughs between front and rear reception rooms
- Level flooring and threshold removal across the whole space
- Ventilation and extraction planned for an open kitchen
- Open-plan kitchen-diner conversions
- Steel beam installation to remove the dividing wall
Trusted Open-Plan Conversions in East Barnet
East Barnet families choose GS Renovation for open plan work because the steel is only half of it. We deal with the level change between the old scullery and the main house, the heating that no longer suits one large room, the extract route, the party wall detail and the Barnet building control inspections. One team, one programme, and a house that stays liveable while we work.
- Founder-led team with 30+ years of hands-on experience
- Aftercare and snagging support once the job is finished
- Structure and finishes delivered by one team on one programme
- Fully insured, with cover in place on every site
- Heat loss and acoustics considered before the wall comes out
- Beam depth checked against ceiling heights before you commit