Turning an Attic into a Closet/Playroom

hey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff today we're gonna punch a hole in this wall to make a closet in a playroom for this one we're back up here in my boys bedroom now we've done a lot of work up here made some bunk beds and a climbing wall and a dresser but technically this is not a bedroom in the u.s. at least a bedroom is something that has a closet and two forms of egress so you need a door that can open and close and you need a window or door that you can get out of in case of an emergency now we've got a door we've got a window but we don't have a closet yet so today we're gonna punch through the back of this wall into the attic space and recess in a closet but the cool thing is there's some extra space on the side we're going to use that too there's a good amount of attic space behind this wall you get to it by a door that used to be right here on this wall now we've taken that out and we've got it temporarily covered up this is how we're gonna get in and out until we punch the big hole out here alright so the closet is gonna end up going right here in this space and it's gonna stop about right here but that means we have all of that down there to do something with so I think we're gonna make a secret room currently we have to do a lot of insulation though because this is the attic space so the roof is right there it's super hot in here and no way to control the climate so first we're gonna put up some insulation and then some walls and then we'll work on the closet [Music] this r-13 is going to go in between these studs on the outside and so I'm just cutting pieces to the right length and shoving them in there the stuff cuts are really easy with a simple utility knife and then once you've got it you can staple it into the studs I'm using this kind of hammer stapler where you smack it like that that you can use any kind of stapler it works the same [Music] this is fiberglass insulation which is really gnarly on your skin so make sure you're wearing gloves you should probably do long-sleeve too but it is so hot up here I would probably overheat and I do have a mask on and you should probably wear that as well but again it's so hot [Music] I used a speed square to find the angle of the rafters so that I could make a knee wall that went down at the bottom now that trick is covered very well in the bits video that I did all about the speed square that'll be linked down in the description to make this short knee wall I cut down several pieces of 2x4 that were the right height these were going to go every 16 inches on center to make up the wall and the top of them was cut at the angle that I found using the speed square earlier I also cut down one long piece for the bottom plate and one long piece for the top plate but that top plate needed to get an angle as well I set the blade on the table saw to 35 degrees that was the same angle that I found earlier then I cut an angle all the way down this top plate it'll be obvious in just a minute but the reason this angle is there is so that you have a full flat wall with no angle at the top this will make it a lot easier to put on drywall once this walls in place along the bottom plate I'm marked every 16 inches and then centered each one of these studs on that mark I nailed these in with a framing nailer but a hammer would work just fine and you can see on this last one what happens when you don't have enough air pressure after that I put the top plate against the angled part of the studs and drove in nails from there I knew that I wouldn't have any trouble getting this wall up to stairs because it was pretty small but if you have a bigger wall like that you're probably gonna want to make it in the room that it's going I got this thing slid into place and made sure that it was plumb and then just hammered in some nails down into the floor and up into the rafters above [Music] now since I'm cutting out a section on the wall I have to reinforce the stuff that's sitting on top of that wall which is currently the rafters and to do that I'm going to put in a header now I'm going to make a header out of two two by sixes sandwiched together but that doesn't quite become thick enough so we're also going to cut a piece of half-inch plywood to put right down the middle glue all three of those pieces together and drive in screws from both sides that'll make a really solid beam to put in place and carry the load of the rafters above [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so I've got the power cut off because it's time to take out these studs and their electrical wires running through them so I've cut the power off to the circuit so that I know are here but I also want to double-check with this thing this will tell you whether electricity is running through a wire as long as that doesn't turn red you're good basically all I'm doing here with the electrical is unscrewing everything pulling the switch and a plug down to studs and then putting it all right back where it was is nothing difficult it just had to be moved this video is sponsored by energizer and they gave me that vision HD plus focus headlamp that I'm using and it was a huge help on this project with the electricity turned off I didn't have to worry about trying to manage a flashlight I had both my hands-free and I could put the light exactly where I needed it it was really handy in fact I kept it on even after the electricity got turned back on it's a very handy thing to have around I keep one in my shop I keep one in my vehicle go check them out I have a link down in the description if you want to find out more [Music] [Music] so this pipe right here is actually a vacuum system that's built into our house we don't really use it very often especially up in this part of the house so I'm gonna cut it off and cap it right below this line [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] after that was capped off I went to the outside of the wall and took off the trim that was nailed through the drywall into the bottom plate of the wall so it had to come off before I could take that bottom plate out then all of the vertical studs on that wall were sitting on top of that bottom plate so I used a multi-tool to make a cut at each end of my new opening and then used a pry bar and a hammer to lift that piece out of place two wires were coming up out of the floor and went through that bottom plate so I had to undo them from the receptacles to pull them back through that hole and even after that they were still coming up out of the floor in the wrong place I had to cut out a section of this pine planking so that I could move them down one stud so there were two wires that came up out of the floor here and they were actually coming right into where we're gonna put that opening so I had to rewrap those unfortunately that means I had to tear up some of the planks that were down here covering all the joists and so I'm gonna have to go back and patch that but now I got to drill some holes to reroute those wires up into this section and then put everything back to where it was [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] after that I get all the electrical wired back up and then cleaned up the rest of the opening where my new header was going to go I also cleaned up the outside edges where the jack studs were going to sit to make sure that they would go right into the place where I needed them when the time came then it was time to put in the header now this was a really tight fit which is a very good thing you definitely want it to fit well it's pretty important it was kind of hard to knock in and I ended up getting out the big five pound sledge to get it in there after I got it pushed all the way up and flushed with the outside of the studs then I laid in my Jack studs these get knocked right into place underneath the header to support it then I drove in some nails to tie them into the studs behind them [Music] done for today so I didn't show all of this work but I did have to move some electrical around and it's all over out of the opening now also I had to move an air-conditioning vent I ended up having to move that up to where you can't really even see it but it still goes into the other room but we're gonna leave the grate where it was to keep a little bit of airflow into this room into that to kind of equalize the temperature a little bit so I've got the rest of the insulation up this gap right here is gonna be our access door to get into the rest of the attic in case we need it so made some good progress all right so the plan has changed just a little bit but I think it's actually gonna be for the better originally this was going to be a really separate room from the closet and I was gonna put up a wall right here in between with a door but now I think it makes more sense to just leave the whole thing as one big space of course we still do have to have some attic access there and I've got that figured out but that means we have to build another one of these new walls to extend this all the way across so we're gonna do that and then work on the access to get into the Attic [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so now we've got to make a little frame to go around where the attic access is gonna be and you could use 1 by 6's for this but I actually don't have any on hand I do however have a scrap of old one by 12 so I'm just gonna rip it down to the right sizes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I knocked off four of these pieces into place making sure that the bottom edge of them overhung 1/2 of an inch from the rafters that's so that when we add drywall to the ceiling the drywall surface will line up with the bottom edge of this board also the size of this access door doesn't really matter at all there just happen to be some plywood there on the top and the bottom so I worked around that it seemed like a big enough opening that we could get things in or out of the attic space if we needed to [Music] behind this Raptor there was one stud going up to a rafter above it because we have kind of a weird roof basically I just had to mark it and cut it a little bit shorter then move it over a couple inches so it wouldn't be in the way of the door opening and closing [Music] and digging theory trying to find some screws that are not going to be too long and poke through the piece of wood we're going to use for the door and then also some ones that are really long so that they'll go into the two by sixes on the side I cut down a piece of half-inch plywood for the door but if the humidity affects it at all then I'll just replace it with pressure treated wood and it should be fine alright so there's not really any way for us to film this to actually show you what I'm about to do but basically we're going to take this hinge this side of it is going to go on to the two by six that's here for the rafter and then the long slide is going to go on the backside of our piece of plywood that's gonna be our door so I'm gonna screw that up in there with the hinges on this side so the door will open that way and then we're gonna lay some of this insulation on the backside of that door should be good to go okay so I like Josh is awesome and he can film this so we're gonna do another big shout out to energizer here we couldn't have gotten this shot without the light from the headlamps it's a great tool to have around they're really well made but they're pretty inexpensive they've got lighting options for a bunch of different situations be sure to go check them out [Music] after the door was all taken care of and insulated it was time to start taking out the old trim from the old door eventually we're gonna build in some pretty shallow shelves in here so that there's some storage inside the bathroom but the first step was to remove the old frame we've got the door in we've got all the insulation in we've cleaned up a little bit and so now it's time to actually cut the big hole in the bedroom now we want to do this in a way that doesn't tear out the drywall around it we don't want to break that so you need to score the drywall and in this case I'm gonna score it on the front and the back [Music] now I want to score those lines on the other side of this wall as well but obviously I can't see exactly where that is so I'm going to use the drywall knife or drywall sword as I call it before and poke it through the corners as a point of reference then on the other side of the wall I can use those to score the lines [Music] [Music] [Music] that went surprisingly well and there was very little cleanup so next we had to cut out the rest of the pine flooring so that I could put in a full replacement board that multi-tool is super handy and jobs like this I measured out the total size that I needed and then cut down another one of those 1 by 12 boards to fit in there [Music] the next step is to put up the drywall on here and unfortunately I'm not going to give you all the how-to for putting up drywall it's not hard it's just out of the scope of this video but I'm sure you can find a good resource if that's something you need to do like I said it's not hard it's just kind of tedious take some time [Music] other than the finishing work one of the only difficult parts of drywall is making sure that you get the areas cut out correctly for your fixtures that goes for light fixtures and receptacles and plumbing you have to do a quite a bit of measuring to make sure that you get your holes cut in the right place [Music] [Music] we've got the room all primed and painted here it's ready to go so now we're ready to close in this frame and then put in some flooring back here now the room and this floor are at different levels they're a little bit more than a three quarter inch difference I could lay down another level of subfloor here to try to even it out but that transition is gonna be a little difficult so instead I'm just going to take advantage of it and build it up a little bit and put the frame on top of that I went ahead and got some primed MDF to use for the door jamb let me use the same material for the bottom sill of the opening now cut down a 2x4 to put in place to lift up the surface just above the flooring on the upper section [Music] then I laid in the bottom piece and made sure that the front edge of it would match up with where the trim went once I got that put in then I went ahead and nail in the top one to match and to get ready for the flooring I rolled out some underlayment all right I'm ready to put down the hardwood flooring this is the same stuff I've used before when we renovated this room so I'll link that video if you want to find out more about it but it snapped together it's super easy to put down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I was so proud of my daughter for helping out she's a awesome after we got the trim put on the outside of the opening I added some trim to the inside and around the access door I also put in some baseboard all around the inside of the closet just to clean it up [Music] [Music] all right got all the trim in place pretty much so now I'm just gonna use some spackle to fill in all the nail holes and then it'll be time to paint but I'm not gonna make you watch me paint now it's time to hang up the bar to hang all the clothes on and we came up with some really kind of complicated ways to make brackets we ended up with just a simple L bracket that will go into the rafter and these are gonna work out fine they're a little rough around the edges because they're made for construction so I'm going to use a flat disk to smooth them out and then we'll spray-paint them so they'll fade away Alexa turn on the exhaust for the rod to hold the clothes I used a really large dowel and cut it down to length I needed to make a slit and each one to slide in the bracket I held up a piece of wood along both ends and drew a line so that those lines were parallel then I cut along those lines with the jigsaw this was just big enough of an opening to hammer in the bracket and on the second end it actually wasn't big enough you can see a really small split there but the good thing was I was planning on drilling a hole through the wood through the metal and then driving in a screw to tie it all together I got a new light put up and then figured out exactly where I wanted the bar to go so that there was enough room to get hangers on and off but one of the problems was that the far rafter actually was inside the wall not along that edge I had to climb into the attic and screw on another piece of wood so that there was something to drive the screw into and man was it hot in there I was only in there for a couple of minutes it shows me that the insulation was really helping after the bar was screwed into the rafters I put the registers back on that exposed hole in the wall and then it was time to hang up the clothes [Music] all right so it's about finished the only thing that I don't have on here is a set of doors now there's a bunch of different ways that you could cover this depending on your particular space you can do bi-fold doors barn doors sliding doors on the inside you can hang up a curtain if you wanted to I'm gonna add some doors but that's going to be a separate video all by itself so it is working as it is for now let's check out the inside of it [Music] so this was a huge amount of work but I'm really glad to have the project done we've got a lot more storage up here now both for hanging clothes and for toys and a little hangout space for the kids so that's really cool it was pretty scary to cut a huge hole in the wall but as long as you do your research you'll be fine just make sure you check your local building codes to make sure that you have the correct header for the span and the load that's gonna be above it if you've got a project like this that you're worried about starting let's talk about it down in the comments we can share some ideas and maybe you can get some courage to make that first cut big thanks to energizer for sponsoring this video if you want to check out one of those headlamps be sure to hit the link down in the description I've got lots of other videos that you may want to check out click those and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time a bedroom has to have a door that can open and close and then a second wait dang it maybe we can share some ideas and you can get confident too confident confident countin out that hmm

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 5,063,568

Rating: 4.9016571 out of 5

Keywords: home, home renovation, closet build, addition, adding a closet, attic, in the attic, playroom, adding a playroom, converting a space, diy, how to, how-to, interior design, iltms, i like to make stuff, bob clagget, bob clagett

Id: r2HVspCoH84

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018