The "sub" Attic, The Attic, and the Next Projects

So Jeff & Tammy (windows and gutters people from Got Gutters?) came by today to do more measurements and talk kitchen again – they have measured everything else up and will be sending me quotes…

Jeff wanted to see if he could see headers over the living room window so I went & got the step ladder out of the shed so he could look into the sub-attic. No go – so he will have to peel off some of the siding and look under that – sounds like I not only have shiplap on the outside of the walls, but also shiplap on the inside of them as well – under the drywall.  Anyhow, he will come by some time this week or next during the week to have a look.

So since the ladder was already in the house, I decided to get up into the attic proper in order to take some measurements and pictures.

Now, what I think is that the house originally had three really small rooms instead of two small rooms.  All three of them would have been around 9’ x 9’. The reason I think this is that the walls in the “sub-attic” measure about that – and one of those spaces (the one over the front room) is still totally intact (as far as I can tell) – the space inside this picture is about 9x9 and measuring in the room underneath, there’s another (about) 9x9 space at the end. The junk up there was left behind by previous people and I just haven’t thrown it away yet.

The joists over the bedrooms (and the closet – which is just a box built and not actually supporting the real roof line) are all 2” x 4” – I didn’t measure any of them – they look standard measurements. Oh – and I measured – this “sub attic” is about 33 inches from the top of the 2x4’s to the bottom of the ceiling.

The joists over the living room appear to be 2” x 6” and look like they are notched to fit over the 2” x 4” s sun along the outside walls – if you look more to the left of the first of these three pictures, you can see how the joists appear to be notched. The bathroom, incidentally, is also a box they built in after the fact and the plastic pipe and air hose to the right are over top of the bathroom.  The stains there are from leaks in the roof line before they replaced it – the roof is 100% leak free.

Now here’s something interesting… the ceiling you see isn’t actually lath & plaster, (as I thought it might be) nor is it drywall – it is something called backer board – looks like particle board – which is why, when it got wet when the roof leaked, it all buckled like that. 

THIS is what the ACTUAL ceiling is:

Yes, the actual ceiling is tongue and groove and looks AMAZING… I will not be leaving that up – that will come down and be used for other project work – it looks like it might be the tongue and groove planks that were used for wainscoting…Anyhow, what that means is that the actual ceiling is solid wood!

Oh – and it looks like they were pretty fancy with the upper walls and ceilings in all of the rooms, because where there was a seam for the backer board, they nailed a strip of wood on it – and in the roof line over what must have been the middle bedroom, the wood is still natural colour…

Now, into the actual attic.  All of the joists are TRUE 2” x 8” rough cut fir:

I climbed all the way up there and took pictures and measurements…

It looks like this on all 4 sides – this is facing the front of the house.  So to the top of the angled beams there is about 5’ of height and to the top of the peak running centre beam there is about gap, outside 7” 3”.  The approximate amount of use-able floor space would be about 7’ x 15”  - so there would be enough room up there for one large bedroom. & it would have to have one of those modified peak roof lines.

And for windows, I was snooping online last night and saw these – which I thought were a REALLY interesting option for attic windows - I would need mosquito netting, for sure!

So I think that, bearing in mind that the closets between the bedrooms are actually just a “box” that was built in place AFTER the ceiling was lowered, I can actually look at having the false ceilings taken out in the bedrooms to start, and use what is currently the closet space to have stairs put in – it would be a set of stairs that would be like the ones I had in the rental town house when I lived in Comox – so a few steps, then a landing and then a few more steps up into the upper floor. Closet space in the lower bedrooms can then be customized into the “under stairs” area so it isn't just a lot of lost storage space.

With love across the waters...