How To Strengthen Your Attic Floor
Strengthening attic joists for live loads by sistering.
How to strengthen your attic floor. In massachusetts attic floors must support at least 30 lbs ft live load the same as bedroom floors if the attic is accessed by means of a fixed stairway 780 cmr 5502 3 1 use a span table to determine the necessary joist dimensions given their span length spacing wood species and grade. Start with the attic floor. 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. However flooring your attic can make it a perfect place for storage.
How to make floor joists stronger. Doing so the wrong way means that you could weaken your structure squash your insulation or find yourself with one foot planted firmly through the sheetrock ceiling below. Long spans of joists in newer homes may wobble or bounce from foot traffic. To floor an attic you ll need to install a sub floor for support before laying your plywood floor.
The methods we ll cover make floors stiffer but not necessarily stronger. Mike embarks on a project to lay a floor in the attic loft space. If your floors are bouncy and also noticeably sagging they probably are too weak. After several centuries of service floor joists in older homes may sag or crack.
Fortunately there are attic flooring solutions that work well in the often harsh and unheated. This article will show you three better ways to take the bounce out of a floor. But if the floor is covered in plywood you can t stuff enough insulation beneath it to do the job sufficiently not even in warm climates. Sistering is the process of adding a new joist next to each existing joist.
You can stiffen the floor in just one room or in as many rooms as you like. First you ll need to measure the area you want to floor so you can calculate how much wood you ll require. Flooring your attic is the best way to add space to your home at a low cost. Because the simplest and cheapest way to insulate an attic is to add material to the floor.
Mike embarks on a project to lay a floor in the attic loft space.