Stairs to Nowhere
Early on, when we started the Laundry Room project, we could get into the attic. The attic over the kitchen/dining ell looked like this:
Sometime in the past, there was a pull-down stair in the upstairs hall. When the ceiling was lowered, they just left it there. We already had a big hole in the laundry room ceiling, so I took the opportunity and hauled it out, then laid new floor.
Structural Defects
The builders of the Outback had abandoned the project before completing the framing, or maybe they just never got around to blocking the joists over the second floor, so consequently some of them had started to twist under the load of the roof. We had blocking installed immediately.
Then at some point we noticed an oddity in the framing. I’m not an experienced builder, but I’d expect rafters to be supported directly on top of the wall, with a birds-mouth cut (left), and the joist securely fastened to it. This provides lateral support, preventing snow loads from spreading the rafters and wall outward. Instead, the joists were cantilevered out over the wall with the rafters sitting directly on top of them. This raises the attic headroom, but it leaves almost no nailing surface. I was alarmed to find that in some places I could see no nails at all, meaning that the only possible fastener might be a nail driven from above. I was relieved that snow load had not already collapsed the entire roof.
You can see there’s not much holding this joint together.
Our solution was to make 3/8″ plywood gussets, one on each side of each joist, glued with polyurethane and screwed. I think 72 of them. Then we added more blocking on top of the wall to hold the future insulation in.
Outback Attic Floor
The stairwell had been completed in 2011 but there was no floor up there, only open joists. This meant we could not heat the building, since heat would just go straight out the roof. In January, 2019 I started laying a floor.
Normally, you’d use 4’x8′ sheets. Not so here – the bozos who built it were incapable of framing anything on 16″ centers, so the joists were unevenly spaced. Not to mention the difficulty of getting large sheets up there. I went with shiplap flooring.
First, I made sure there was blocking all around the perimeter
Then laid flooring