Homeowners in Northern Virginia: do you need more living space or storage room? If the answer is yes, look up! Your unfinished attic, with its existing floor, walls, and roof may offer the perfect opportunity waiting to be used.
To be a good candidate for remodeling, your attic space needs three important ingredients:
- appropriate headroom
- easy access
- adequate floor joist support
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Headroom is of primary importance. Building codes require at least 7 1/2 feet of headroom between the peak of the roof and the floor. Yet, if you don’t have this space, you may also raise your roof (which can be a good idea for an entirely different blog post — and budget.)
Another important factor to consider is access to your attic. Will you have to carve the space for a stairway from an existing room? Or would your best choice be a pull-down staircase? (Building codes don’t allow the use of a pull-down stair for main access). Think about the traffic patterns that will develop to and from your converted attic space.
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Additionally, a critical aspect of using your attic is the strength of the floor joists. Most ceilings are not designed to withstand the weight that a floor must handle. This means that the ceiling joists must be reinforced, which can be a complex process.
Before you begin, let’s talk. While you might be able to tackle some remodeling projects yourself, attic remodeling requires greater expertise. Clients in Northern Virginia come to Schroeder Design/Build for uniquely designed spaces to serve a range of functions — an extra bedroom/bath suite, guest room, office, family room, exercise room, or hobby room — and once they look up, they never look back!
All the best,
Trish Schroeder
Schroeder Design/Build, Inc.
Trish@SchroederDesignBuild.com
703-449-1700
