Is a narrow doorway making your home harder to live in? Maybe the sofa won’t go through, a wheelchair or walking frame catches the frame, or the kitchen and dining room feel cut off from each other. Widening the opening can fix that without taking the whole wall out. But a bigger hole in the wall doesn’t solve the problem on its own. What matters is the space you can actually walk through once the frame and door are fitted, and whether the wall can safely lose that bit of itself.

Here’s how we’d plan it with you, so the finished doorway does the job you had in mind.

Be clear about what you need

Start with the problem you want to fix. Getting furniture in once a decade, making daily life easier with a mobility aid, and opening up two rooms so they feel connected are three different aims. Each can point to a different opening, door, and finish.

The number that matters is the clear opening. That’s the space left to walk through with the door fully open. It’s less than the width of the door itself, and less again than the rough hole in the wall, because the frame, hinges, stops, and the thickness of the open door all take a bit.

Think about the approach too. Walking straight through is easy. Turning out of a narrow hallway into a doorway is much harder, especially with a wheelchair or a walking frame. If a radiator, cupboard, or piece of furniture sits right beside the door, widening the opening may not help much unless that changes as well.

Where the change is about mobility, the NHS explains how a home adaptations assessment can look at how you move around your home, often with an occupational therapist. Their recommendations are a great brief for the design. They don’t replace a check on the wall or the building work itself.

Remember it still has to work as a door every day. If you want privacy, less noise, or a way to keep the dog out, a wider door may serve you better than an open archway.

Find out what the wall is doing

Internal walls can hold up floors, ceilings, and roofs, separate rooms for fire safety, and hide cables and pipes. You can’t tell which just by looking or by tapping. A wall that sounds hollow can still be carrying load, and older houses in particular can have walls that were altered years ago in ways nobody wrote down.

If the wall is load-bearing, widening the opening means the load above has to be supported properly. That needs a design from a structural engineer, covering the lintel or beam, what it bears on, and how the work is propped while it’s done. We work to that design. Picking a lintel by eye, or copying what a neighbour did, isn’t a safe shortcut.

Planning Portal’s guidance on building regulations for internal walls explains that removing or altering a load-bearing wall, including forming a wider opening, brings building regulations into play. Building control will want to see the engineer’s calculations and inspect at the right stages. Get that sorted before any work starts.

Our RSJ installation work covers the steel side of structural alterations. An RSJ is only one option, though, and plenty of doorways don’t need one. The engineer’s design should decide what’s needed, not the other way round.

If the wall isn’t load-bearing, the job is usually simpler, but check anyway. The wall may still play a part in fire separation, especially near the stairs in a taller house, and building control can confirm whether anything applies.

Choose the door before the opening

Decide what’s going in the gap before the hole is sized. A single wider door needs more swing space. A pair of doors gives a wide opening when both are open, but for everyday use you’ll usually only open one. A sliding door frees up the swing but needs wall space to slide along.

Sliding pocket doors, which disappear into the wall, change how the wall is built. They may not suit a load-bearing wall, a wall with pipes or cables in it, or a spot where fire or sound separation matters. Check that early rather than falling for a picture online.

For illustration, widening a doorway next to a radiator might give you a better opening but leave nowhere for the radiator or the door handle. Moving the radiator brings in heating work, and the bigger door swing might then clash with a cupboard on the other side. These are connected decisions, and they’re easier on paper than halfway through the job.

Centred isn’t always best either. The most useful route through the room may need the opening off to one side. A measured drawing helps compare how it looks, how it works, and what the structure allows.

Plan the making good

Widening a doorway leaves a lot to finish. Plaster, skirting, architraves, flooring, and decoration all need attention. Ask for a written scope that says what will be made good, what can be matched, and where you might see a difference.

Flooring is the usual surprise. Where the old wall stood there may be no floor finish at all, or the two rooms may sit at slightly different levels. Agree how that join will be finished before the work starts, whether that’s a threshold strip, new flooring across both rooms, or something else.

Cables and pipes often run beside door frames or through the wall. They need finding and moving by a qualified electrician or plumber. Please don’t drill or cut exploratory holes to look for them yourself.

Our building services cover the building side of the job and coordinating the trades around it, so the opening, the services, and the finish are planned as one piece of work.

Think about access during the job too. If the doorway is the only route to a bedroom, bathroom, or the back door, tell us, so temporary arrangements and dust protection can be planned. There will be times when the opening isn’t usable, especially while any structural work is propped.

When a wider door isn’t enough

Sometimes widening a doorway reveals that the real problem is the wall itself. If what you want is one open, connected living space, taking the wall out may be the better plan. Our article on removing load-bearing walls explains how that’s done and what’s involved.

Whatever you decide, keep the drawings, the engineer’s calculations, and the building control completion certificate together. They’ll help if you sell the house or plan more work later.

Internal doorway questions