Open-Plan Conversions Oakwood

Oakwood gardens are long, and the best thing about opening up these houses is what happens at the back of them. GS Renovation removes the internal walls, frames the rear opening and installs the steel to an engineer's design across N14, then deals with the less glamorous consequences of one large room: heat, sound and cooking smells.

In Oakwood, a knock-through finished as one room typically costs £3,000 to £8,000 or more, including the steel beam (indicative London ranges, MyBuilder and Checkatrade, 2026). GS Renovation Ltd, a building contractor based in Potters Bar, does the work in Oakwood: the structural engineer we appoint designs the steel, we install it, and building control signs it off.

How the job runs

1. Free site survey at your Oakwood address, covering the walls, services and floor levels, and an itemised quote.
2. The engineer we appoint sizes the beam, and the work is registered with Enfield Council building control or an approved inspector. On a shared wall you serve the party wall notice as building owner; we supply the drawings.
3. Props in, opening cut, beam on padstones; then floors, heating and electrics are joined up.
4. Building control inspects the steel before it is covered. We finish the room, and the completion certificate follows.

Opening the back of an Oakwood house to the garden

Take out the wall between the two rear rooms and most people immediately want the back wall opened as well, which turns one beam into a portal frame: a beam over the opening carried on posts, with those posts holding the wall above and often the floor too. Deflection is the detail that decides whether it works. A steel sized only for strength can still sag several millimetres, and sliding door manufacturers routinely demand far tighter limits than the structural minimum before they will stand behind the glass.

So the engineer we appoint is told what glazing is going in before the beam is sized, not afterwards. Large sliding or bifold sets also want a level threshold that still drains, which on a long Oakwood garden usually means a channel drain across the opening and a fall running away from the house. We fix the finished floor levels at the start of the job for that reason. A threshold detail decided late is the one that ends up with rainwater standing against a door.

Housing in Oakwood

The Council Tax list puts Oakwood at about 3,450 homes, 44% flats against 56% houses; 3% went up before 1919, 44% between the wars and 52% after 1945. 37% of homes here are semi-detached; a semi in Oakwood usually opens up with one beam, one end on the shared wall.

Laying one floor across two rooms in an Oakwood house

When the wall between two rooms comes out of a post-war Oakwood house, the floor becomes the difficult part. With 52% of homes built after 1945, the ground floor here can be a concrete slab with a screed on top, and the two rooms may have been screeded to slightly different levels. The strip where the wall stood is filled and screeded to match. Heating pipes were sometimes buried in that screed, and copper laid directly in it can corrode over the years. Pressure test those runs while the floor is open, and reroute them in insulated ducts rather than covering an old weakness with a new floor.

An interwar Oakwood house raises the opposite problem. The front room usually has a suspended timber floor, while the rear room or kitchen may be solid, so opening them into one space puts two different constructions side by side along the old wall line. A continuous stone or porcelain floor laid across that junction tends to crack exactly there, because timber moves and concrete does not. The fix is a decoupling layer, or a deliberate change of finish on the line. The void under the timber still needs its airflow, so vents blocked by the new work are ducted through.

Living in one open room in N14

A 1930s house was designed with doors that kept the heat where you were sitting. Knock the ground floor into a single space and the heating has to be reconsidered, because radiators sized for two small rooms rarely cope with one volume that now includes a large area of glass. We check the emitters against the new room, and where the floor is coming up anyway, underfloor heating over an insulated build up is worth a conversation, particularly if you are laying stone or a large format tile.

Sound and smell are the other two. In one room the extractor stops being a nicety: a properly ducted hood taken through the wall at a decent diameter, with as few bends in the run as possible, is what stops the sofa smelling of last night's cooking. Hard floors, fresh plaster and a wall of glass make an open Oakwood ground floor lively to sit in, so acoustic underlay under the flooring, an insulated stud wall somewhere in the plan and deliberately placed soft furnishings are all a great deal better planned in than discovered later.

• Broken-plan layouts and Crittall-style glazed dividers
• Knock-throughs between front and rear reception rooms
• Rooflights and glazed roofs to bring light deep into the plan

VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for Oakwood Park & Highlands. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Plenty of Oakwood projects start with one job and grow, so it helps to see home renovation in Oakwood, open-plan conversion across Enfield, builders in Enfield, converting a garage into living space, our London open-plan conversion page and Maximising Natural Light.

The GS Renovation Difference in Oakwood

We plan an open plan ground floor as a whole rather than as a hole in a wall. The engineer is briefed on the glazing before the steel is sized, the threshold and its drainage are set out at the beginning, and the heating and extraction are dealt with rather than left as somebody else's problem. Enfield building control certifies the structure, and one team stays accountable throughout.

Checked by Abdelaaziz Saaid, founder and director of GS Renovation Ltd (Companies House no. 14611254). Structural design is by the consulting engineer appointed to your project.