Boarding out your loft? Do this first!

in this video we're going to look at how a loft conversion can be done in a traditional property so that we can prepare it for storage use so we can see here that on the ground we've got the flitch beam which we're going to use in our conversion and it could be any beam it could be a steel I-beam rsj or if the span is short enough it could be a Timber beam the flitch beam consists of two Timbers with a steel flat sandwiched in between so if we remove that timber here we can see the one timber on one side and the steel flat in the middle and now that's bolted through at intervals along the whole length which I haven't shown here so if we go into the property now we'll climb up to the first floor so switching to the sketch model we can see a bit more clearly what's going on here so we'll take this binder out and the the thing we have to be careful with with removing binders and then connecting the existing ceiling to the new beam is that we might get some cracking within the ceiling if the deflections are too high either while we're working on this or once you start applying load to this beam when you start using your Loft for storage and one of the things that you design that Beam for is for limiting the deflection once that storage load has been applied within certain parameters so that it doesn't crack the the ceiling finishes and that's something that your structure engineer will look into so with that ceiling binder removed and with the flitch beam in place we can now put some new floor Timbers in and within this roof structure we can see that this flitch beam spans between the Gable wall here and the load-bearing internal wall here and in a smaller property it would span from Gable to Gable so we'll take a section through the property to show you what's going on here so we've taken off the roof covering one side just to show you the rafters here and this as we saw in the previous video is the purlin we've taken away any ceiling binders that's in there and now what we can do is span new floor joists in between these two beams and we're not going to use this intermediate wall for support because often in this kind of property this wall often isn't there and also if we need to take it away in the in future if we want to make it a bit more open plan at first floor then if we use this wall for support now for the storage conversion then we'd need to put additional structure in later so what we're going to do is this we're going to put joists in and span them across from that beam right across to the other beam and now you can see why we had to remove those ceiling binders because they're actually in the way so we'll remove those again and let's make this a sensible in the size moment it's 41 millimeters so let's make it 47. 160 so let's make it 175 and if we go down into the floor zone here we can see that we've got all this extra space where the existing ceiling is already so what we can do is we can move this further down so we can see that it's dropped down below the beam and we could take it all the way down to the ceiling which is there that would now be flush with the plasterboard below we're not going to take it quite that low down just to allow for it to deflect and not impact the ceiling so we're going to just move it back up by let's say 20 millimeters and now what we can do is we can space that with the same spacing that the original ceiling joists have remove the first one over here and we'll space them out 450 see what that does okay so what we now have here is a new floor and what we would do at this stage is to use plywood rosp sheeting chipboard put that over the top to create the floor so this floor is no longer resting on that wall and if we were wanting to support if we're wanting to remove that wall all we would now need to do is create Noggins in between so let's just show you here over the top of the wall from joist to joist and then putting joist hangers or some kind of strapping down under these existing ceiling joists in order to support them so let's copy that across one and we've got another ceiling binder here which is supporting the ceiling joists over the hallway area so we would be able to get rid of that as well and continue our Loft in that direction so these are supported by joist hangers so they would look something like this you would have the strap here make it a bit wider which would go to the joist hanger here it would look something like that and we could face fix onto this flitch beam that's that's the beauty of flitch beam is that it's got this Timber face to fix to and we can also wrap this joist hanger if it's something like a speedy joist hanger over the top and nail it down over the top as well wrap over and depending on the length of the strap we could then nail it here and here so that detail mirrors on on this side as well I'll complete that part of the model in a minute but that's basically how to create a storage space in your Loft it comprises of structural beam from Gable to Gable or from Gable to internal load bearing wall and spanning new floor joists between them but they can be drop down further between the existing roof joists you can see here ceiling joist sorry in order to give you the maximum Headroom so in this particular property we've now got a Headroom let's just take a measurement down from the ridge top of that board so 2.4 meters that's a good amount of Headroom so if we can let's just say we need around two meters Headroom that's around about there if you can see the the faint line going across so we'd have a good amount of of usable space where we can stand up in so we can get an idea now of the space that we've created here what we'll do is we'll continue putting the mods in nailing them down to the rafters to create the diaphragm that we need in order to stop those which beams from buckling and if you want to watch our videos on how to design a flitch beam and they're going to be in the description below in the next video I'm going to show you how to remove this purlin which is supporting the roof be on this side without the roof covering over it and that purlin is restricting the space that we've got if we were to change this to habitable so what we're going to do is we're going to take those out and we're going to support the rafters on our new beam and that's going to be in the next video so if you have any questions do leave them in the comments below

Channel: Robin de Jongh

Views: 21,589

Keywords: how to build loft storage, robin de jongh, loft conversion uk, uk lofts, how to board loft, attic storage, do it yourself, loft storage ideas, loft storage uk, loft storage new build, diy loft conversion uk, attic conversion uk, flitch beam, flitch beam loft conversion, boarding out a loft uk, boarding out a loft, boarding out a loft floor, loft floor installation, strengthen loft floor, strengthen loft joists, strengthen loft storage, loft floor, loft floor structure

Id: xDddwHq68QE

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023