Attic Renovation Tips

Attic renovation is not as simple as renovating another room in your home. There are several things to consider when you plan to transform your attic into a spare living space or area. Here are some things that you should consider before you carry on any work in renovating that attic.

Attic Height
As you well know most attics are similar in that they usually form part of the space between the roof of your home and its ceiling. For this reason, attics may provide limited spaces to work with. One of the possible concerns that you will encounter would be its height. If the renovation aims to provide additional living space in the home, then the attic height should be one of the important things to check out. It is a common thing for people to see that their attics are not constructed to follow a person's normal height. At most times, attics may offer only some crouching room and, at best, a limited standing room for people. The attic height should be considered if it is to be used as a spare room or as such.

Framing Design
Because attics are located on roof spaces, the frames may also provide some possible renovation limitations. Roofs may be framed by a maze of cross braces and beams that may take considerable space up in the attic. But there are also homes with roofs that do not utilize such type framing to hold it up. For homes with roofs having X and Y framing, it should be considered that these structures are not to be modified in some way or they may cause some structural stability problems for your home later on. The best attics to renovate are open attics. Renovating them would require making use of a truss layout though.

Accessibility
One of the important things to consider when you plan to renovate your attic is its accessibility. If you wish to transform an attic into a spare room, then you might need to install a staircase to reach it. You must consider checking the available space wherein you might be putting such a staircase. Although you may have some space saving options available such as using a spiral type staircase, still, accessibility should be a primary concern. Accessibility may pose a problem during attic renovation since you may end up either having a too steep an access point or a too narrow entry way going up the attic. Careful planning may help keep such a problem within reasonable levels.

Stability
In planning for an attic renovation, you should also try to check if the structure surrounding it would be strong enough to hold some additional weight. This would especially be crucial if ever you wish to make that attic into a spare bedroom. Remember that the attic floor was designed to be only a ceiling of the room below it. Transforming it into a spare room may require it to be stable enough to hold up the weight of its future occupant or two. Try to see if you might need to add up some reinforcing frames to enable your attic to bear more weight as a spare room. If you forget to check out such stability issues, you might just end up having cracked ceilings or stability problems which might later on become costly problems to address. It is better to check these issues first before you ever proceed on renovating your attic.