Loft conversion stairs - avoid this pitfall

so we want to put a staircase in to have permanent access up into the Loft space so that we can use it as a habitable room the easiest thing to do or at least on the face of it is to put a staircase in over the top of our existing staircase so we've basically copied the staircase from ground to first floor and the immediate issue that we have when we do this is that of Headroom regulations tell us that we need two meters of Headroom above every staircase this isn't measured perpendicular to the pitch line of the staircase it's measured from the tip of the tread and then going straight upwards so about 2 000 millimeters that's two meters from the pitch of the stair and the issue is that once we get to the top of the staircase the Headroom that we need isn't there so here we can see when we get to two meters we're well outside of the roof so what if we move the staircase back so we've already here moved the staircase back a little but often we don't have sufficient room to do that so if we pull in some color and we'll just pull back this section we can see that in here actually is a room and regulations tell us that the space between the bottom tread and an opening door has to be at least 400 millimeters that's in the UK so we could move this back another 100 millimeters but that would be about it so we still have the Headroom issues when we get to the top of the staircase so you can imagine emerging at the top of this stair and straight away you're looking at the pitch of the roof so it's going to look something like this when we're stood on the top of the staircase so how do we fix that well one fantastic option is to put a Winder either at the bottom or the top of the staircase so we've been able to move it much further back and bring it round this way if we were to block up that door and put it in elsewhere which is obviously not ideal at all or we can bring it right up to the door because now we don't any longer have the requirement for 400 millimeters to that door because what we would do is we would put some stud wall in there so if we move this a hundred millimeters this way just demonstrate that we would have a stud wall up here that would go all the way up to the ceiling now the bottom Landing is coming down into the existing hallway that one works okay except that we still have the Headroom issue here so as we're emerging from the staircase we've now still not quite got the two meters and with something like this you potentially what you could do is put a roof window in here which reduces some of the depth of the roof locally to that staircase now if we replace that stair with staircase with a Winder at the top then we can see that this solves most of our problems because we've still got the staircase 400 millimeters from this doorway but when we come up through the floor the winders turn it to the left now why is that such a game changer well if we plot on here the Headroom that we need so here in green we have the Headroom if you imagine an enclosure of two of two meters then we can see that it barely impacts the roof and the reason for that is because there is a regulation where if you're coming in on the pitch of a roof so part of the side of the stairs is by the roof pitch and we can have a reduced Headroom here on this side of 1.8 meters as long as in the middle of the staircase it's 1.9 so here where we land roughly in the middle of the staircase we can see that the Headroom is 1.9 over on this side it's just a little bit too much just coming through the roof structure but I think we can still take a 100 millimeters away on this side and that should sort the problem out so that's perhaps your preferred option now an option that's even better is if we move the staircase all the way back and we have a Winder down here as well then you can see how well it's using the pitch of the roof to accommodate the Headroom and you're using all of this lost space here so probably the preferred way of going about a staircase would be to have a Winder at the bottom and at the top let's have a look at how we would support this staircase here the original ceiling which we have supported on Noggins which I've just hidden for clarity for this particular video what we need to do is to take this large hoist and move it over a point at which the first tread starts and usually what we'll need to do is double this up because of the additional loading of the staircase and then we can move that one out of the way or this case remove it completely the existing ceiling rafter will need to be cut through and we can take that all the way back to the beam because as we've seen on a previous video this is supported it's hanging off the new beam using a truss clip so we'll do the same with these so now we've got support for the staircase and just checking the Headroom again we can now see where the Headroom intersects it's roughly at the beam location so what we'll do is we'll take these ceiling joists all the way back to the beam as well so what we do is we'd make sure that these were already supported on the new flitch beam here or Universal beam and then just saw down to remove the ceiling joist obviously having cut off the plasterboard first of all we've now created the open space for the staircase we'll just cut this one back as well so there we have it now what we can do is put a trimmer across here just so that we can have some boarding in here so we would have a trimmer across there and this could either be an open Atrium or we could if we hadn't cut those joists right back we could put them in on those joist hangers here onto the trimmer but let's just do that we put those in something like that looking at it from below a stair like this is going to have a slight bulkhead at the top because of the the winders at the top but usually these are plastered quite neatly so better than I've drawn it here and also just bear in mind that that is right over the top of your existing staircase and looking at it in section again you can see that that Winder is directly over the top of the staircase so there's nothing to stop you just having a stud wall here and this would come up to the ceiling level and could actually support the staircase and if you did that then that would be a enclosed staircase and you wouldn't see the bulkhead at all from below so that's how to structurally support a new staircase into a loft and the reason we've put it over the existing staircase is because all of this here where you see the new Loft staircase was essentially Dead Space wasn't used for anything sometimes there is just a cupboard here on the on the left and the reason that's important is because if you put the staircase anywhere else then you are robbing space from your first floor in order to create some within the Loft space

Channel: Robin de Jongh

Views: 252,333

Keywords: loft conversion stairs, loft conversion uk, DIY loft conversion uk, loft conversion, diy loft conversion, attic conversion, loft conversion structure, robin de jongh, staircase design 3d model, loft staircase installation, loft staircase plans, loft staircase uk, staircase design, space saving staircase, staircase headroom, loft headroom, loft stairs, loft access, loft hatch structure, build it with rob, loft conversion stairs uk, loft convertion stairs

Id: pfU5Do-U4AQ

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023