Changing Attic Joists For Living Room

Use a zippered insulated tent to keep the enclosure draft free attic tent at 7 attic cover insulator 120.

Changing attic joists for living room.

If your attic joists won t bear the weight necessary to finish out a living space but the engineer cleared them to support floor decking for light storage you can install inch plywood or. Access is not an issue as it s also in front of another room upstairs that i can put a door in the wall. Converting an attic into a living space is a great method of adding another room to the house but it is not a job for the average diy person. Add weatherstripping around the perimeter and a sweep to the door of a walk up attic.

That means you ll need 2x10 floor joists or maybe 2x8 in rare circumstances and at least 2x12 roof rafters. It s a 12 12 roof so that s a good 11 at the ridge which even with new floor joists and a 5 knee wall should be plenty of room for a nice space. Pull down stair or ladder. The attic space is 22 on the side parallel to the trusses 28 on the other side.

Reclaiming the space under your roof also avoids many zoning and easement concerns common chores when adding onto a house. Tim great reading your tips. Technical issues such as locating a safe staircase and the distribution of additional joists required to accommodate the new load bearing and stress factors. An attic bedroom exploits roof space previously devoted to high school yearbooks and nesting sparrows.

There s plenty of room to make a 12 x 12 room with 10 foot ceiling at its peak. Think of it like this. Stacking joists is not nearly as stable as sistering which braces the joists against twisting. Not so with stacked joists.

The trusses are double cantilever style. You can probably walk across the edge of a 2x6 joist but if you stack the joists two high and try to walk across your last name better be wallenda. Often existing joist bays are filled with electrical and heating ducts that will need to be relocated. Once you convert attic space into living space you need to bring it up to the standards of modern building codes.

Attic hatch or door. Affix rigid foam insulation to the attic side of the hatch or door. Blocking solves the problem. Converting an attic to a living area yields a modest return on your investment.

Positioning the new joist adjacent to the existing preserves precious ceiling but it does come with some potential complications. The new attic plan needs to provide access to each part of the attic.