Covering Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire & all surrounding areas
HMO conversions · The Freebird Pub, ST5
A former pub being converted into thirteen letting rooms — steels, propping and structural alterations
A former public house being converted into thirteen letting rooms. Pub buildings have large open ground floors carrying the structure above on a handful of points, so creating room divisions means taking load somewhere it has never been before.
Substantial structural alterations. New steel throughout to pick up walls that are being removed, extensive temporary propping while the permanent structure goes in, and the whole thing sequenced so nothing is ever unsupported.
Currently on site. Steelwork and structural alterations are in progress — these photographs are from the live build rather than after the fact.
This is a live project, and these are photographs from the middle of it rather than a tidy set taken on handover day. We’ve put it on here on purpose.
A terraced house has load-bearing walls roughly where you’d expect. A pub has a big open ground floor with the structure above carried on a small number of points, because the whole design brief was to have as few things in the way of the bar as possible.
Converting that into thirteen rooms means putting walls back — and the load paths that made sense for a pub don’t line up with the ones a bedroom layout needs. So it becomes a steel job.
The photographs with rows of adjustable props are the part that matters. Every opening gets propped before anything is cut, the props stay in until the new steel is properly bearing and the padstone mortar has gone off, and openings are formed one at a time rather than all at once.
It’s slower. It’s also the difference between a structural alteration and a structural failure.
Once the structure is complete the building moves on to fire compartmentation, services and room fit-out. A thirteen-bed building is a licensable HMO and, at this scale, the fire strategy is a genuine design exercise rather than a checklist.
We’ll add the finished photographs here as the job completes.
A bay-fronted terrace taken to first fix and rebuilt as five en-suite rooms
A dated family house turned into letting rooms with a communal kitchen
An end terrace stripped back to the studs and rebuilt as five rooms
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