How To Strengthen Your Attic Floor

If your floors are bouncy and also noticeably sagging they probably are too weak.

How to strengthen your attic floor.

Flooring your attic is the best way to add space to your home at a low cost. Long spans of joists in newer homes may wobble or bounce from foot traffic. Mike embarks on a project to lay a floor in the attic loft space. Because the simplest and cheapest way to insulate an attic is to add material to the floor.

After several centuries of service floor joists in older homes may sag or crack. This article will show you three better ways to take the bounce out of a floor. How to make floor joists stronger. Mike embarks on a project to lay a floor in the attic loft space.

Sistering is the process of adding a new joist next to each existing joist. 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. 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. 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.

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. The methods we ll cover make floors stiffer but not necessarily stronger. You ll have to construct a wooden frame or sub floor with boards 16 inches apart to provide extra support for the floor.

However flooring your attic can make it a perfect place for storage. 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. If the attic joists are not adequate one way to strengthen the floor for live loads is to sister the old joists. Stop using your attic for storage.

Strengthening attic joists for live loads by sistering.