This has been on the to-do list for a few months, now, and we decided to finally set aside some time to get it done. Turns out newborns keep you busy, who knew?!
Like most houses, the attic in our house is pretty sparse: just joists and insulation. We’ve made this work up until now by using scrap wood to bridge the gap between said joists, but it’s far from ideal and always a little sketchy. So we decided to put our heads together and fix it.
The plan is pretty straightforward: get some 1x2s to run perpendicular to the existing joists and to give us some room for insulation to hang out, then run some nice plywood over the top of them to give us a floor to store all the things.
Anyway, we took a ton of measurements of the area we wanted to use, drew some stuff on a napkin, and figured out roughly how many 1x2s and how much plywood we’d need to throw on top.
We pre-drilled all the holes for the 1x2s, as I quickly discovered they will easily split once you start screwing then down.
A few of the 1x2s ended up butting right up to the ends of joists without any support underneath, so we got some 90-degree steel brackets to mount under for some reinforcement. Worked a treat and was really simple to do.
We ended up getting some 3/4″ plywood to put over the top of these 1x2s because there’s no kill like overkill.
On a totally unrelated note, it turns out 4×8 sheets of plywood will just barely fit in the back of a Chrysler Pacifica if you push the driver’s seat all the way forward and do your best Lieutenant Dan impersonation.
We cut the very heavy plywood into more manageable pieces so we could actually carry them up into the attic without killing ourselves.
Everything ended up lining up damn near perfectly and my lovely wife screwed down all the plywood while I watched the baby.
Now it’s just a matter of moving all of our decorations back up to the attic and freeing up that space in our guest room for more 3d printers…
Out of My Element 