Installing Plywood Floor In Attic
It isn t but you ll need a dose of common sense to execute the job of installing an attic floor properly.
Installing plywood floor in attic. The previous homeowner may have simply covered the joists with plywood to use the space for storage. You ll have to construct a wooden frame or sub floor with boards 16 inches apart to provide extra support for the floor. Plan to pull up the flooring and layer new. Stop using your attic for storage.
Attic flooring consists of materials as basic as sheets of plywood as well as more elaborate interlocking floor systems. Attics with existing flooring. But if the floor is covered in plywood you can t stuff enough insulation beneath it to do the job sufficiently not even in warm climates. All it needed was flooring to become a place to stash all our stuff.
According to the us department of energy your home s attic should have an r 38 insulation valued for homes in the southern part of the. Before putting the flooring in take a look at your insulation. Alternatively your attic may already have some sort of floor but this doesn t necessarily mean you can build rooms. The solid base allows you to store items in the attic as well as to walk.
Start with the attic floor. Heat rises so the insulation in your attic is the most important part of your home s insulation. To floor an attic you ll need to install a sub floor for support before laying your plywood floor. With all these challenges you might start thinking that attic flooring installation is impossible.
Plywood floor in attic of older home. First you ll need to measure the area you want to floor so you can calculate how much wood you ll require. If your attic joists won t bear the weight necessary to finish out a living space but the engineer cleared them to support floor decking for light storage you can install inch plywood or. How to install plywood flooring in an attic.
Because the simplest and cheapest way to insulate an attic is to add material to the floor. We used plywood sheets readily available at lumberyards cut into 2 by 4 foot panels and installed them perpendicularly to the floor joists with a screw gun.