Last weekend I finished expanding the attic. This was 1 job out of 4 I had to do for my New Years Resolution #2. That was confusing, just click the link if you care. The work doesn't actually look like it was that big of a deal, but it was much harder than meets the eye. Plus the attic fluctuates between cold and hot so quickly, you never know what you're going to get when you open that hatch. Last weekend I was dripping with sweat due to the heat. All in all, I ended up adding about 40 square feet of space. That about doubles the room we had before.
We actually don't even have a lot of crap to put up there, right now it's just Christmas decorations. It was just becoming unmanageable to keep that stuff up there without infringing on the space for our heater. I feel like there should be a nice big bubble of free space around it, so the need for expansion was necessary.
Here are a couple pics:
Oops, that's Roatan, Honduras... man that was a sweet trip. I'm still wearing my necklace every day.
Oops, that's Honduras too with a big group of awesome.
OK... let's see if I can find a picture of the attic:
The picture above is of all the wood that I installed. Right in front of Liz is the big fluffy panel that we pull back over the attic entry, so everything under that panel and behind me are the parts of the attic that were already there.
You can also see the thickness of the floor where Liz is standing. Not only did I have to lay floorboards, but I also had to install 6 inch beams on top of the 4 inch beams that were already there in order to raise the level of the floor on that side of the attic. That gives the floor enough room for insulation and wires and stuff. That was a HUGE pain in the butt, having to deal with itchy insulation. There is also a little section in front of Liz that I kept open. There is a light in the hallway right under that section. I wasn't comfortable covering that up because I wanted to make sure we could replace the light easily in the future and I also didn't want to cover it and have any risk of fire if the light needed room for ventilation. I'm taking no chances, playing it safe.
And now a picture with the Christmas decorations dispersed to their new homes until November. You can see the shinier wood that I put down. I thought about adding shelves in the back to set things on, but I have more important things to do than pimp out a storage space that is not named "garage".
And here we have the only attic space we used to have for the decorations. You can tell that we really only had a small space of about 8 feet long and 3 feet wide that we could put stuff.
The other thing that I should note, is that the original attic was installed with 3/4 inch wood. When walking around Lowe's trying to decide what wood to get, I decided on 1/2 inch wood because it was cheaper and I was alone and you'd be surprised the difference in weight between the two. I just didn't feel like trying to get that wood off the shelf and into my car. So instead I decided on the thinner wood and put joists support connector things underneath to add support under all the floorboards. The only part that doesn't have support is the little panel there on the right because I couldn't nail behind it in order to install the support beam.
So 1 New Years Resolution task down... 3 more to go. Woo hoo!
1 comments:
That was a great project. Always need storage space.
By: Susan on March 1, 2011 at 1:36 AM
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