EriX
Established Member
Hi
My girlfriend and I are talking about moving in together. As she owns her own house and I am renting I would be moving into her place. After discussions it has boiled down to I get to have the attic as space for my toys . It is currently a small bare room (I am shortly going to measure it up and create a sketchup model which I could post). The main problem with it is that the stairs come up the centre of the room and cut it in half. Being a small room the logical tv wall would be the one you walk towards as you come up the stairs. This means that the banister is quite in the way and in general makes the room look quite small when I think it is actually of a usuable size. A solution that we have thought about is removing the banister around the stairs (ignore any building regs comments for now, we'll address that later) and putting in a door in the floor. This would mean that when you are up there you could close it and suitably covered would just be part of the floor and you could have a decent sized room.
Now I've looked all over the internets () and cannot find anywhere where someone has done something similar (maybe because it contravenes regs?).
Surprisingly the hole in the floor is just slightly smaller than a regular door size which may be useful. If I was to use an external door (i.e. strong enough to be stood on) and then hinge it on one side I'd have my floor door. One thing is that it would be quite heavy (queue thoughts about spring or gas assists??). It'd only really be closed when there is someone in the attic in which case they could open it for a person coming up from below, and when the attic was empty the floor door would be open. There is still a door at the bottom of the attic stairs for fire prevention purposes and this will be staying.
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?? My girlfriend's dad is pretty handy with the DIY and I have a few contacts to ask if need be for purposes of doing the work too.
We toyed with the idea of a sliding door into the floor cavity but this would take a lot more engineering.
I've attached some pics, they aren't great cos I only had my mobile on me but they might give some idea of the room. The approximate size is about 4m long (parrallel to the stairs) and there is about 2.5m between the supporting beams, with about 1m each side past the beams (that make sense??)
I've seen some cool solutions to people's av problems so I'm hoping you can help me too.
Regards
Eric
My girlfriend and I are talking about moving in together. As she owns her own house and I am renting I would be moving into her place. After discussions it has boiled down to I get to have the attic as space for my toys . It is currently a small bare room (I am shortly going to measure it up and create a sketchup model which I could post). The main problem with it is that the stairs come up the centre of the room and cut it in half. Being a small room the logical tv wall would be the one you walk towards as you come up the stairs. This means that the banister is quite in the way and in general makes the room look quite small when I think it is actually of a usuable size. A solution that we have thought about is removing the banister around the stairs (ignore any building regs comments for now, we'll address that later) and putting in a door in the floor. This would mean that when you are up there you could close it and suitably covered would just be part of the floor and you could have a decent sized room.
Now I've looked all over the internets () and cannot find anywhere where someone has done something similar (maybe because it contravenes regs?).
Surprisingly the hole in the floor is just slightly smaller than a regular door size which may be useful. If I was to use an external door (i.e. strong enough to be stood on) and then hinge it on one side I'd have my floor door. One thing is that it would be quite heavy (queue thoughts about spring or gas assists??). It'd only really be closed when there is someone in the attic in which case they could open it for a person coming up from below, and when the attic was empty the floor door would be open. There is still a door at the bottom of the attic stairs for fire prevention purposes and this will be staying.
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?? My girlfriend's dad is pretty handy with the DIY and I have a few contacts to ask if need be for purposes of doing the work too.
We toyed with the idea of a sliding door into the floor cavity but this would take a lot more engineering.
I've attached some pics, they aren't great cos I only had my mobile on me but they might give some idea of the room. The approximate size is about 4m long (parrallel to the stairs) and there is about 2.5m between the supporting beams, with about 1m each side past the beams (that make sense??)
I've seen some cool solutions to people's av problems so I'm hoping you can help me too.
Regards
Eric
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