I'm working on fixing up my small kitchen in a house from the late 1700s. There used to be an old baking oven in the house, but for many years it's been filled with stone/mortar, making it unusable. My wish now is to take some space from the old gigantic chimney to create a slightly more practical kitchen.
What you see in the "before" picture, where the iron stove and the small cooktop are, the chimney runs right above that. In other words, the chimney has 2 out of 4 sides that go down to the ground; the last corner is replaced with an iron rod. I've now demolished this and will rebuild it similar to how it was before but with space for a proper cooktop and oven next to the iron stove.
What I'm considering is whether it's possible to raise the hood that's there today to make some more room while cooking. Do you think it could be anchored to the flooring and hold any potential weight? So, it's essentially 2 out of the 4 sides, you could say, and which previously was an iron rod. Do you think this weight could rest on beams? If I construct some kind of steel beam structure or similar and then let this rest on the ceiling beams. Of course, I'd have an expert come in to do it, but I just wanted to throw out the idea here and see what you think about it.
You can count on brick and mortar having a bulk density of 1.8 kg/dm3. Then it's "just" a matter of calculating the volume of the chimney above the removed support in dm3 and multiplying by 1.8. Natural stone, if present, has a bulk density of 2.7 kg/dm3. Then it's about assessing how much of the chimney's weight rests on the support, but if you assume a quarter, you're probably not under-dimensioning, provided that the chimney is symmetrically built. I would have considered this problem before removing the support. It's not entirely risk-free to tinker with such old masonry constructions.
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