Morning all,

Just had new insulation put in my loft, but the joists were not deep enough to take it so it’s been placed on top. I’ve got a whole load of stuff to put back up there so wanted to board it out. Has anyone raised the level of the floor like this so it’s above the insulation? Think there are a couple of options:

1) Use loft floor legs that are available – only concern with these is that they will just load all the weight on to a certain point?

2) Put some 100mm tall cross battens across the existing joists and chuck the loft boards on this.

Interested to see what others have done/ what people feel is the best and cheapest solution!

Cheers

I’ve battened across mine and it seems to be okay. I don’t use the loft much and rarely walk up there, just a case of storing things up there.

I did 2 and was just think about how the loads are being spread (4 years after I did it). I drilled a hole in the rafters, but the loads are near vertical so should not be an issue. Loft legs could work though, would not concentrate the load any more than the rafters already do anyway. The rafters only have two contact points with the joist as it is.

Yeah would be in a similar position. Did you just batten across at 90 degrees to the existing joists? What size timer did you use roughly?

Same direction as existing joists. First tranche of floor was rather overbuilt, and used massive beams. I think the other stuff was just 2×4. Doens’t need to be that strong, just look at the existing timbers. Although they are super high quality timbers for rafter use, yours won’t be taking that much load and there’ll be floorboards helping to support.

I run two “layers” of 2″ x 2″ directly on top of the existing rafters. Didnt use 4″ x 2″ purely because of having to screw through 4″ of timber. It worked fine, no issues. Cost difference was minimal, so I opted for 3/4″ ply instead of chipboard, & just had 8′ x 4′ sheets cut down the centre to fit through the hatch.

I should add my floor is about 60cm or so above the original joists, for loads of insulation.

It may sound like overkill but it made a noticeable difference to what was already a well insulated house. The biggest difference though is sound insulation. Huge reduction in noise from cars and lorries outside, and especially wind noise in bad weather.

Was the floor already boarded? If so, why not lift the new insulation and replace with kingspan and then pop some new floorboaring down on that (a sort of insulated sandwich)?

Cheers for your views! There is no flooring down at present, so I think I’ll just batten across the existing joists and then floor over the top of this. Thanks for your help!