Taking out a chimney breast is one of the most effective things you can do to a small terraced bedroom, and it is one of the most consistently underestimated jobs in terms of waste. Chimney breast removal produces a volume of rubble that has been sitting inside your wall for a hundred and twenty years, and none of it looks like much until it is in a heap on the landing. We deliver into a lot of these through our Litherland skip hire service.
Get the structural side settled before anything else
We are a skip hire firm and not structural engineers, so take this as the observation of people who have seen a great many of these jobs rather than as advice on your particular house. A chimney breast is carrying load, including the weight of everything above it, and removing one at ground floor level while leaving the stack above needs proper support designing in.
That means building control involvement and, in most cases, a structural engineer. In a terrace it may also mean a party wall consideration, because the stack is frequently shared with next door. People do take these out without any of that, and the ones who get away with it are lucky rather than right.
Settle all of that first. The waste side is the easy part by comparison and it can wait.
How much rubble is actually in there
More than you think. A ground floor breast in a standard terrace typically yields several tonnes of brick, mortar and infill, and if you are taking the stack out through the upper floor and roof as well you can multiply that considerably.
The brick itself is dense. The mortar and rubble infill behind and around the flue adds to it. Then there is a century of soot and debris that has collected in the flue and comes down all at once the moment you breach it, usually over everything you own.
Because this is heavy inert material, the weight limit rather than the volume decides your skip. Our page on skip size versus weight limits explains the mechanics, and our builders skip hire for construction and renovation waste page covers what these loads usually involve.
For a single ground floor breast, an 8 tonne builders skip is the sensible starting point. For a full stack removal from ground to roof, plan on more than one and talk to us about exchanging rather than trying to make one container do it.
Soot, and what it does to the load
Soot is the thing nobody warns you about. A flue that served an open coal fire for decades holds a remarkable quantity of it, and it is fine, black, greasy and gets into absolutely everything.
For the skip, the relevance is that soot contaminates. Clean brick rubble from a chimney would ordinarily be excellent material for crushing and recovery. Brick that has come out of the flue itself, coated in soot and tar deposits, is not the same thing. Where you can sensibly separate the clean structural brick from the flue material, it is worth doing.
For the house, get a sweep in before you start if the flue has ever been used. It is a small cost against the alternative, which is soot through every room on the same floor.
Getting it out of the building
This is the real work. A terraced house means carrying every barrow load down a staircase, along a hall and out through the front door to a skip on the street. There is no shortcut and there is no machine that helps.
Bag it. Rubble sacks, filled no more than two thirds, carried one at a time. It sounds slow and it is faster than the alternative, because loose rubble in a barrow will not go down a staircase and a bag that is too full will either burst or injure somebody.
Protect the route properly. Hardboard down the stairs and along the hall, taped at the edges. Brick dust ground into a carpet by a hundred trips does not come out.
Do not stack rubble on an upstairs floor while you work. Several tonnes concentrated in one bedroom is a genuine load on joists that were never designed for it. Take it down as you go.
Where the skip sits on a Litherland street
Most of the housing here has little or no off road parking, so the road is usually the answer and that means a permit from Sefton Council at £36 per month. Our guide to skip permits in Southport covers the process for the borough.
Position matters more than usual on this job because you are carrying heavy bags to it repeatedly. Directly outside the door, as close as the permit allows, is worth insisting on. Every extra metre is multiplied by several hundred trips.
Local coverage
We cover this whole area from our own yard, running Bootle skip hire and Seaforth skip hire jobs alongside Litherland, and our drivers know how tight these streets get when both sides are parked. Clean rubble coming back to our own site gets crushed and recovered rather than disposed of, which our environmental and recycling page explains.
Ring us on 0151 909 6399 before you start breaking anything out. Tell us whether it is one breast or the whole stack, because those are very different jobs. Our contact page is there as well.
