Day 879: Going Overboard

After a few weeks of procrastination it was finally time to tackle the overboarding and insulation. My new ladder would get a real test with 420 kg of wood plus many more of junk going up it over the next few weeks. Try this yourself and you'll see why I don't need a gym membership.

But shortly into the process, I found my first obstacle, a hornets nest. And of course this was in a fairly difficult area to get to - right in the corner. As it was still winter, I was fairly confident that the nest was dormant and that I wasn't about to wake up hundreds of angry mini beasts. Well hopefully.

Still, I took precaution. I had a flat board underneath to catch the debris and used a long, long pole to knock it down. And thankfully I managed to carry out the task unharmed. Still, I wasted little time to put the nest into a rubbish bag and get it outside in the bin.

Coincidentally, the next day when I was up in the loft I found what looked like an angry queen hornet looking for a new home. But she was quickly reacquainted with her former accommodation back in the bin.

With the adventures hopefully over, it was time to get back to the job at hand - insulating and boarding over the loft.

This is a fairly easy weekend job for the average DIY'er .. but since I really like to over-do things, it actually took me 2 weekends.

The first step was to run "proper" 2x4's perpendicular to the original ceiling joists to provide some additional structural support. I say proper as these ones had to be a full 100mm high to match the existing cross beams - versus the typical CLS wall studs you get which are actually 83mm. These beams were fixed with many, many heavy duty angle brackets and a generous helping of 50mm #5 woodscrews

I ran the new studs at 600mm centres to minimise the amount of timber that I'd need - I was still short however. The wider centres will mean more flex in the floor but seeing that we don't plan on hosting any break dance competitions in the loft, the wider centres should be ok. The loft boards are 1220mm so this worked out well.

The only hickup - there is always one - was that the existing cross beams were at neither 400mm nor 600mm centres and they weren't made with the same precision that we find today. What this all meant was that the original 2x4's would stick up in the middle of the loft boards and it would be next to impossible to fit the tongue and groove floorboards property.

Two solutions came to mind 1. Plane off some of the old timbers or 2. Groove the loft boards to accommodate.

As the 2nd option would allow me to use my router (yeah power tools!) and also make for a better story, I decided to go for it.

In theory this was easy. Just measure out where to cut, fix some guide rails and router away. In practice however, it's slightly more difficult. The challenge is that chipboard isn't really wood and probably something closer to Adamentium (see here). As the smoke from burning wood and melting router bit was appearing before my eyes, I finally realised my predicament. For reference, chipboard contains wood chips, glue and likely anything else they swept from the mill floor including bits of metal. I ordered a coupe of spare router bits from Amazon to manage all the melting. I also went a bit shallower with my cuts to just shave a bit off at a time.

The loft boards are really easy to lay down (routering aside). The other point to make is that they are 1220mm long, so they can overhang or fit flush with joists. For 600mm centres, the extra 20mm needed to be cut from each board. This is best done in one go for all the boards. I just set the guide on the circular saw and cut away.

Now the loft was starting to look like a useable storage space. Notice my trusty Karcher vacuum .. it got a really good workout on this task. I think I ended up hoovering up about 10 bags of nastiness.

At the entrance to the main part of the loft, I left the floor at its original height so that I could get in without overly contorting myself and to make sure larger items could fit through the smallish opening.

The nearly finished product. You'll notice that I had to notch out the boards for the roof rafters and supports. I found it easiest to bring my jigsaw up into the loft with an extension cord so that I could just do the cuts in place. Lots of sawdust, but I had my vacuum up there anyway.

So there you go. A finished, unfinished loft ready for storing all our junk. All in all, a good project. I think I spent way too much time up there - to the point that I was getting quite at home with my surroundings. Anyway, the last couple of weekends has been all about putting our junk up there - don't worry, it was actually to dull to write a post about.

Day 872: Let there be light

Now that we had an easier way to get up into the loft, it was time to shine a bit more light on the other section so I could eventually get to the task of boarding things over. However, part of me wondered if I'd really want to see what I was getting into given how bad the other side was when I first got up there (see here). But hey, maybe I'd find some more archaeological treasures. 

I elected to go with the same Philips directional LED lights that I used on the other part of the loft. Not because they were particularly good or cheap, just because I like things matchy-matchy. Besides., the whole world will see my work on the Interweb and I can't exactly have non-coordinated lighting.. how embarrassing. 

This job was actually pretty straightforward as the switched lighting circuit was already hooked up in the other section - I just needed to run a new 1.5mm cable to the new lights. The only difficult part was installing the lights. I wanted them mounted up fairly high which meant that I had to stand up on the ceiling joists to drill the holes to fix them. At the time, I had no idea how much weight the joists were meant to support and I didn't want to have a Chevy Chase Christmas Vacation moment (see here). Needless to say, as the comedic value wouldn't have justified the pain and damage, I was a bit more careful.

I also brought up my trusty work light stand to provide some additional lighting while I was working up there. This once again came in handy. The legs were wide enough to straddle the joists and it was invaluable to be able to position the light on the area that I was working on.

And you see those pipes running up and down the photos? A little piece of history. They were the original gas lighting runs which were common in houses before electricity became popular around WW1 (see here). A lot of respect to the people hand cutting and threading these things on site long before power tools. I don't think I'd like to be doing DIY back then (no power tools, no cars, no Amazon) ... It sounded like real work.

I'm sure the loft was a one way route. Things seemed to go up there but nothing ever came back down. Hence the old pipes, old wires, old slate and a bunch of other rubbish. Unfortunately, no antiques or other valuable archaeological finds. I don't know why I keep hoping to find some ...

Anyway, now with the monster gone, the steps secure and the lights on, I was fully out of excuses from having to lug all those boards up into the attic. Not looking forward to that.

Day 865:Getting on the housing ladder

Seeing that I was about to lift about 29 square meters of chipboard and about 18 2x4's up into the attic (about 420kg of wood) not to mention all the junk we were going to hide up there afterwards, my little leaning telescopic ladder thing wasn't going to cut it. I'm also sure it would have probably ended up with a hospital visit at some point.

So it was time to invest in a proper loft ladder. Luckily ScrewFix read my mind and put one on sale for me :). The one that we bought was the 3 piece aluminum extension type made for "light use" with a capacity of 150kg. I don't weight that much so I'm guessing heavy use with a light person maybe also counts. Regardless, this ladder would be at least fixed to the building so less chance of getting frequent flyer miles at the A&E.

These ladders are super easy to install. The kit came with hatch door hardware as well - but I already too care of that earlier (here). The idea is that they fold in 3 and collapse into an open area of the loft. The only difficulty was that the area of the loft where we have access doesn't provide for a whole lot of room. I measured the length and the height but the round arc was the issue. Will have to just test it out.

The other challenge with installing the ladder was that you still need a second ladder to get up there to fix everything. Or a really trusting friend (that you won't just leave them up there).

I used 60mm screws to hold it in place and make sure that I was screwing down to something more than just chipboard. The ladder is on hinges and slides down into place. It was adjustable to 3m so lots of height as well - think we are at about 2.8m extended.

And there you have it - a much better and safer way of getting up into the loft. Now I just need to carry my 400+ kg of materials up the ladder. Gasp!

Day 862: Lofty ambitions

Now that the Monster in the Attic has been beaten, we can finally venture out into the rest of the loft area. Our intent was to board it over to provide some storage space until which time as we can finally build into the loft (on Day 14,684 at the rate we're going). Generally, boarding over the loft is quite a simple task (see my previous post here), however as usual, I got a bit carried away.

But like any good Brit, I'll blame everything on the weather. 

Last week, the UK got hit by the Beast from the East - a cold front from Siberia that dropped treacherous snow and cold across the country bringing it to its knees.

• UK storm death toll reaches 10 as ice warnings follow snow chaos
• Storm Emma, ice and snow paralyses transport across UK
• UK crippled by snow, freezing temperatures

Canadians have a name for this kind of weather, "a normal winter's day"

But hey, I'm in the UK now so I felt it was my patriotic duty here to overreact just like everyone else. This unwarranted response manifested itself in my completely over-engineering the loft boarding exercise. 

OK, granted houses in this country are not exactly built to withstand sub-zero temperatures very well and our place wasn't exactly the tropics during this recent cold snap. But, this weather only happens once every 5 or so years. 

Regardless, on impulse I decided we were not only going to board over the loft .. we were also going to insulate. So the order went in, and it arrived today.

As you can see, there is a lot of stuff ...

Basically, the idea is to top-up the 100mm insulation currently in place with another 100mm and then board over that. The building regs recommend another 170mm; but the loft board will provide some insulation and this way I can use 2x4's (or whatever the metric equivalent is) running perpendicular to the current joists vs having to use plastic stilts (see here). Besides, I didn't want to get too carried away with my overreaction.

Anyway, I've once again got a house full of building materials that I need to put somewhere. Stay tuned over the next week(s) as I start moving all this material up into the loft area. I've got my work cut out for me.