Planning to renovate the kitchen in an apartment located on the top 5th floor. The building was built in 1925. Attached are three images:
1) Before shows how it looks today except that the door and wall between the kitchen and maid's room have been removed.
2) After shows how it looks after the cold storage in the kitchen, wardrobes in the serving room, and the door and part of the wall between the serving room and kitchen have been removed.
3) Shows the direction of the floor joists
The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors have the same layout.
The question mark is the wall section between the serving room and kitchen. My guess is that the wall is not load-bearing, but then the floor joists in the serving room must rest on a wooden or iron beam running between the outer load-bearing walls.
What do you think, is the nearby wall running between the outer walls in the kitchen load-bearing? Can the opening between the serving room and ceiling be increased by removing 2 dm on each side of the door and up to the ceiling above the door? How can you most easily determine what the floor joists rest on?
The original wall between the kitchen and the serving corridor was not load-bearing. It is evident from the construction drawings that there is a steel beam in the floor structure responsible for the load-bearing. In the later drawings, the wall has been moved slightly so that it is directly under the steel beam, but I can't imagine that the beam has been removed.
