A steel beam is only as good as what it bears onto and how it got into the house. GS Renovation installs beams across NW7, sized by the structural engineer we appoint and inspected by Barnet Council's building control. More than 30 years of hands on experience means we settle the bearings, the access and the temporary works before a delivery is booked.
Getting a beam into a Mill Hill house
Access decides more than people expect. A house off Mill Hill Broadway with a driveway and a side passage will take a seven metre universal beam without much drama. A property on a narrow lane near Mill Hill Village, behind a high wall and a gate with a mature front garden inside it, may not, and then the answer is either craneage with the road managed for a morning or a beam supplied in two sections with a bolted splice designed by the engineer and made up inside the room. That changes both price and programme.
Bearings come next. The engineer specifies padstones, usually precast concrete or a mass concrete pad cast in place, to spread the end reaction into masonry that can actually take it. In older village property built in lime mortar a standard padstone can be too small a footprint, and a longer bearing or a steel spreader gets specified instead. We cut the pocket, dry pack above the beam where the detail calls for it, and we never wedge a steel up on slate offcuts and trust the plaster to hide the result.
Propping, fire protection and inspection
Temporary works are where the real risk sits. Props are set off sole plates and needles, onto a floor that can carry them, which in a house with a suspended timber ground floor means bearing down to something solid rather than onto floorboards. The wall comes down in stages, the steel goes up, the load transfers and only then are the props struck. Barnet Council's building control, or an approved inspector, wants to see the bearings before they vanish behind plasterboard, so that visit is booked while everything is still open.
Then the beam has to be protected and finished. Structural steel in a dwelling normally needs 30 minutes of fire resistance, achieved with two layers of plasterboard rather than plaster over bare metal. If the beam sits up in the floor zone to keep the ceiling flat, the joists are carried on hangers off the web, which means opening the ceiling and often a strip of the floor above, so we tell you at the outset whether the bedroom is coming into the job. Expect the ceiling overboarded and skimmed rather than patched.
- Flitch beams where a slimmer steel and timber solution suits
- Bearing checks into party walls and shared masonry
- Building control applications and inspection sign-off
- Beam boxing, fire protection and plasterboard encasement
- Load-bearing wall removal and knock-throughs
The GS Renovation Difference in Mill Hill
People call us for the steel and stay for everything around it. We appoint the engineer, build to the calculations, plan the access and the temporary works, and get Barnet Council's building control to inspect the bearings before anything is covered. Nothing is improvised on the day, and you finish with a certificate rather than a beam nobody can vouch for. More than 30 years of hands on experience.
- Aftercare and snagging support once the job is finished
- Straight advice on what is and is not worth spending money on
- Our own trades on site rather than a chain of subcontractors
- Making good and plastering priced in, not treated as an extra
- Temporary propping in place before anything is cut
- A written scope and programme agreed before work starts