How do I support a brick dormer cheek

C

CozHouse

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Desperately need some urgent help!
We have a dormer with a brick cheek that runs down inside the house to the floor.
We need to remove the wall inside the room but need to leave the end cheek in place.
Is there any way we can support the brick cheek by fixing something sloped underneath - joinery, steel, lintel, anything?
The cheek is only supporting the end of the dormer roof.
We are trying to avoid removing the whole cheek and replacing with studwork as this will cost too much.
Any help greatly appreciated :)
 
Urgent? Like its suddenly happened that the wall need to be removed?

You urgently need a structural engineer to come up with some whacky design.

Alternatively, and more sedately, a beam at floor level.
 
Hi Woody, thanks for your reply... Well it seems urgent to us as we have to make a decision on how to proceed before my husband flies out of the country tomorrow. (I won't bore you with the details of why we didn't know about this sooner!)
Please can you explain what you mean by a beam at floor level please?
I forgot to say that it's a double skin wall, block/brick, 100mm cavity.
Many thanks
 
If you take a wall out below a floor, and that wall is supporting the floor or something above the floor, then you need to put in a beam at floor level to hold up the things above it.
 
Isn’t it at rafter level where the supports needed? If dormer cheeks are staying but whatever’s below is going. In which case not sure how that’d work
 
23vc said:
Isn’t it at rafter level where the supports needed? If dormer cheeks are staying but whatever’s below is going. In which case not sure how that’d work
Click to expand...
But how is that going to be acheived simply?
 
It isn't going to be simple not to remove the wall.
In fact I suggest it will be cheaper to remove it and replace it with timber.
 
Catlad is correct, in that if the dormer cheek carries down to the floor, and you wish to remove the part of the wall in the room but retain the masonry externally, it would be cheaper and easier to remove all the wall and rebuild the cheek in studwork and cladding.
If the wall is a cavity wall as you say, it would need a considered and probably expensive design to support the masonry adequately, possibly with steel members, but how to support those would give an SE some head-scratching. Are you notifying Building Control? - you should.
You can't do a complex job such as this in a rush before your o/h is flying off somewhere; if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
 
Thank you all so much, yes it would be to remove the brick wall below the dormer end cheek.
If replacing the whole wall is the only sensible option and it would probably need an amendment to planning and scaffolding too, then I think we need to rethink the internal layout.

I posted the question on the off chance someone had done something similar before and knew of a nifty solution that we hadn't thought of (in our inexperience!) so all of these replies confirm what we thought and are what we needed to hear.
Thanks again
 
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