Structural Calculations

Yes. Part A of the Building Regulations applies even where the work needs no planning permission and no commencement notice. The new beam has to be sized for what it carries, and its bearings and padstones checked down to what is underneath them, and the calculations are the only record that they were.

Not from its thickness: a 100mm block wall can be structural and a 150mm stud wall can carry nothing. What tells you is what sits on it. Joists running into the wall rather than alongside it, a wall directly above it upstairs, or a purlin in a cut roof propped off it all mean it is carrying load. The visit settles it before anything is priced.

Where the wall carries anything, yes. The floor, roof or wall above is held on temporary props, or on needles through the wall, while the opening is cut and the beam is set, and the props stay until the beam is bearing fully on its padstones. Every calculation set we issue comes with a note on the propping the builder needs.

There is no such approval in Ireland. The owner is responsible for complying with the Building Regulations, and a building control authority does not check or approve calculations before the work. What you need is the calculations, kept for the day the house is sold.

Only if it is over 45 m² and the owner has not opted out of statutory certification. An extension of 45 m² or less is outside BCAR, but it still has to comply with the Building Regulations, so the calculations and an Opinion on Compliance are what a buyer's solicitor will ask for.

Any competent designer can prepare them, but the certificates under BCAR are signed by a chartered engineer, a registered architect or a registered building surveyor, and those are the signatures a lender and a buyer's solicitor look for. Our calculations are signed by chartered engineers.

An engineer can inspect it, opening up the structure where that is the only way to see the beam and its bearings, and give an Opinion on Compliance if it is adequate. Where it is not, the same visit says what has to be done to make it so.

Photographs of both sides of the wall, the ceiling over it and the attic above it, the size of the opening you want, and any drawings you have, by email or on WhatsApp to the office number. That is enough to quote a fixed fee and to know what to look at on the day.

The Eurocodes, published in Ireland by NSAI with Irish National Annexes, which is what Technical Guidance Document A points to for showing that a structure complies with Part A.