Bloke at Fairy Meadow knocked on the wall between his kitchen and lounge with a knuckle, listened to it, and told me it was hollow so it couldn't be load-bearing.
Every internal stud wall in the country sounds hollow. That's what a stud wall is. Plasterboard, air, a bit of pine every 450 or 600 millimetres. The one he was knocking on had the ceiling joists for half the house landing on its top plate, and above that a run of hanging beams doing the same job again. Take it out on a Saturday with a reciprocating saw and by Sunday you'd have had a very noticeable dip down the middle of the house.
He wasn't being thick. It's genuinely not obvious from inside the room, and the reno shows have convinced a lot of people that walls come out in an afternoon with a sledgehammer and a good soundtrack. So here's the honest version of that job.
How to tell if it's holding something up
Go into the roof space with a torch and look at which way the ceiling joists run. If they run across the top of the wall, sitting on it or fixed near it, that wall's carrying. If they run parallel to it and there's nothing landing on the top plate, you've probably got a partition and this is a much cheaper conversation.
Roof type matters more than anything else. A trussed roof, which is most houses built round here from about the mid-seventies on, spans wall to wall on the outside and drops nothing on the internal walls at all. Those places are a gift. Conventional pitched roofs, the older weatherboard and fibro places through Corrimal, Woonona and the western suburbs, use struts and hanging beams that land wherever the chippy in 1958 decided they'd land, which is very often the wall you want gone.
Two-storey changes it again. If there's a floor above, something's holding it, and it's usually the wall you're standing next to.
Other hints: a wall sitting directly over a subfloor bearer or a strip footing is a strong signal. A wall thicker than the others in the house, same. But hints are all they are. I've been wrong about a wall from the room side and right about it from the roof space, and I've never once been wrong from the roof space. Get up there or get someone up there.
What it costs
Non-load-bearing partition, straight removal, plaster and cornice made good and the flooring gap patched: $1,500 to $3,500. That's a couple of days between me and a plasterer, plus a sparky if there's power in the wall, which there almost always is.
Load-bearing with a beam going in: $6,000 to $20,000 for a single-storey job, most of them landing somewhere in the middle. A three-metre opening in a trussed single-storey with an LVL beam and no services to move can come in at seven or eight. A five-metre opening in a two-storey with a steel beam, new posts down to new footings, and a kitchen either side of it will clear twenty without much trouble.
Where that money actually goes surprises people. The beam is maybe fifteen percent of it. An LVL to span four metres is a few hundred dollars of timber. A steel PFC or universal beam for the same span, a bit more, plus the crane or the six blokes it takes to walk it in through a hallway. The rest is engineering, temporary support, the posts and footings under each end, and then all the making good afterwards.
The engineer isn't optional
A structural engineer's report and beam specification runs $800 to $2,000 around the Illawarra depending on how complicated the roof is and whether they need to do more than one visit.
Nobody enjoys that line on the quote. Pay it anyway. The engineer tells you the beam size, what it bears onto, and whether the footing under that bearing point is adequate, and none of those are things a carpenter should be guessing. I've got thirty years on the tools and I still won't size a beam. The National Construction Code sets what the structure has to do, and proving your job does it is the engineer's signature, not mine.
A certifier will want that report anyway. Structural alterations generally need approval, usually a complying development certificate rather than a full application if you're not touching the outside of the house, and both paths want the engineering. The NSW Planning Portal sets out where your job sits, or just ask me and I'll tell you which way it's likely to go. Add $1,500 to $3,000 for the certifier and approval on a CDC.
The bit people don't budget for
Pre-1990 house? Assume the wall linings contain asbestos until someone proves otherwise.
Fibro sheeting, obviously, but also the backing behind old kitchen splashbacks, some textured ceilings, and the sheeting in a lot of bathrooms and laundries. Sampling and a report is a few hundred dollars. Licensed removal of a wall's worth is $1,500 to $4,000 and it has to happen before anything else starts. SafeWork NSW has the rules, and they're not the sort of rules to have a crack at yourself. I've walked off two jobs in my career, both over asbestos, both where the owner wanted to just get on with it.
Then there's everything the wall was doing besides holding the roof up. Power points and switches on both faces. A light circuit running through the top plate. Sometimes water, if a kitchen or laundry backs onto it. Data and TV cable in newer places. All of that has to be rerouted by the right trade before the wall goes.
And the ceiling. When a wall comes out you're left with a strip where two ceiling sheets used to meet and a cornice that stops in mid-air. Patching that so you can't see the join, especially if the ceiling has any texture on it, is skilled plastering and it takes longer than you'd think. Same underfoot: floorboards that ran up to the wall and stopped, or two different floor coverings meeting where the wall was. On a timber floor you're weaving new boards in and then sanding and finishing the whole room so it matches, which on its own can be a couple of grand.
That's the part where budgets blow out. Not the beam.
Roughly how the week runs
Props go in first, temporary support on both sides taking the load off the wall before a single stud gets cut. Then the wall comes out, the beam goes up into the opening, and the posts at each end land on something that can actually take a point load, which sometimes means digging a footing under the floor.
Props stay up until the beam's in and fixed and the engineer or certifier is happy. Then plaster, cornice, flooring, painting, and the sparky back to re-terminate whatever got moved.
Trade time is usually four to eight days. Calendar time is three to six weeks once you add the engineer's visit, the approval, and waiting on a plasterer. That gap between days-on-the-tools and weeks-on-the-calendar catches everyone. I went through the same thing with deck builds and the shape of it is identical.
Is it worth it?
Sometimes, genuinely, no.
If what you want is light and openness and the wall in question is only two and a half metres of plasterboard between a kitchen and a dining room, a wide cased opening leaving 600mm of wall at each end can get you eighty percent of the effect for a third of the price, because the load path stays largely where it was. I suggest that more often than I suggest the full removal, and about half the time people take it.
If it's a proper reno and the kitchen's coming out anyway, do it properly while the room's already wrecked. The overlap in cost is real. Worth reading alongside what a kitchen reno runs around here, because doing both at once is meaningfully cheaper than doing them two years apart.
Who should do it
Structural work over $5,000 needs a licensed builder and a written contract under the NSW licensing rules. No exceptions, and no, your mate with a ute and a good attitude isn't covered. That's the line I go through in the carpenter versus handyman post, and this job is a long way over on the licensed side of it.
Ask whoever quotes you three things. Who's doing the engineering. What temporary support goes in and for how long. And what's in the price for making good the ceiling, the cornice and the floor. If the third one's vague, the quote's not a quote.
That's the wall and stud framing side of what we do, right down the coast from Helensburgh to Nowra. Ring Dave on 0414 007 351 or tell me which wall you're eyeing off and I'll get in the roof space and tell you what it's holding before you spend a cent on drawings.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0414 007 351.
