I live in a house from 1977, bought it 2½ years ago. In two of the rooms, there are two wall-mounted wardrobes. They are really ugly, those classic fixed wardrobes, so I plan to build a walk-in closet instead. I googled around a bit about removing fixed wardrobes and read something about "load-bearing wardrobes." That is, you have to check if it is load-bearing before taking down the wardrobes. That's where I got lost. How do you know if a wardrobe is load-bearing?!
I have tried to create a gap in the wardrobe's base and checked if the floor continues, and it does. The flooring continues, the ceiling panels (ceiling paneling, kind of) continue into the wardrobe itself, and there is wallpaper behind. However, not the wallpaper visible in the room; I think it's a base weave wallpaper. I interpret this as the wardrobes being mounted and thus not part of the room's "construction." But how do I know for sure?!
Enclosed are two sketches of the rooms. The bottom room is a classic 70s house room that I think was originally two small rooms. I grew up in a house from 1973 with a similar construction of two small rooms, but then they knocked down half the wall and closed off one door to create one large room (however, with a piece of the wall in the middle, the same piece that I have as a horizontal wall in the image). There was no fixed wardrobe in that house, so there should not be anything load-bearing in that wardrobe? But it might differ, perhaps...
Constructive tips and tricks for a beginner are gratefully received.
If the pictures are accurate, they are NOT load-bearing. To be load-bearing, they should be integrated into the wall construction in a completely different way than these.
