Do I Need To Reinforce My Loft Floor

While not the ultimate voice in spans these calculators do provide a reality check.

Do i need to reinforce my loft floor.

As always don t mess with electrics if you re not competent but even part k allows you to do a fair bit yourself. This is custom heading element. If your home wasn t designed to support a future attic conversion not only will the joist system require modification an engineer may require additional vertical reinforcement installed in the. Joists you may have thought adequate for your attic floor may not come close to being strong enough.

Floor joists will help to bring up walls that seem to be falling in. The new floor joists of your loft conversion will need to offer at least 30 minutes worth of fire protection which could mean replastering the ceilings in those first floor rooms below. You may need to reinforce your floor joists if you have saggy floors in your house. They can even be found in the basements of homes.

Either way they are put in to lend support to weakening walls and floors. I ve not gone down the regulations route as it s not going to be used as a bedroom. Furthermore squashing insulation down to fit joist height is a bad idea as this halves it s effectiveness doubling your heat loss. Ive just strengthened my loft floor.

For example with such a calculator you will find that for a 15 foot span you need 2x10 douglas fir heart joists spaced every 16 inches. You can still board directly on to the joists if you want but it is worth noting that this would not pass a building control inspection because you wouldn t have the full 270mm depth of insulation required by regulations. Floor joists can be found under the house for example in the crawl space. The best solution is to build a raised loft floor above the insulation details of which are shown below.