Another recent work from Acomb, York. The customer wanted to have better access to their loft space but they only had a small(ish) opening with a push-up loft hatch and a clumsy telescopic ladder to access it (I have a personal thing against these evil telescopic monstrosities).
The job was pretty much straight forward. Purchase an insulated drop down type loft hatch and an aluminium triple extension ladder. On arrival I measured up the ceiling opening and marked for the new hatch. Before the cutting, I planned how I will re-install some 4×2 timber to brace up the new ceiling opening. I was installing these new bits of timber before, during and some after I was cutting out the new hole.
It was during the ceiling-cutting part when I came across a few surprises. Firstly, the house was built a good 150 years ago, which means that the joists in the ceiling were none of these fast grown cheap timber what you can buy in B&Q and will cut by the smallest pressure applied by a teaspoon. It was rock solid and the original opening was fixed together with thick 8(!) inch long nails. I don’t know why they used such huge nails, maybe this ceiling and loft hatch was acting as a bomb shelter at some point.
This obviously made the cutting of the timber a bit tricky. I eventually had to cut out the timber around the nails and then cut the nails separately to take some of the roof joists out. And the ceiling structure was just one of the surprises. The ceiling still had the original lath & plaster ceiling up, they just simply boarded them over at some point with 15mm plasterboard. So my plan that I just use my plasterboard saw and cut the ceiling out obviously didn’t work. Multitool out, get ready for some noise, dust and painstakingly slow cutting.
It’s safe to say that I was relieved when I finally had the hole cut to size and ceiling braced up. I was just looking at it for about a minute and thinking where that 2.5 hours gone since I started the work. On the other hand, the rest of the job came together relatively fast.
Once I had all the bracing and ceiling work done, I just simply installed the new hatch. Took me about 15 minutes total. After that, I started putting the ladder together and working out how it will fold up and adjusting a few stoppers in the system. This took me just about an hour and after this I was ready to clean up and pack my tools away. Before finishing up, I just had to move the loft lights a bit to make sure the folding ladder won’t touch it. All in all, I was finished with the project early afternoon. I showed the customer how to operate the new hatch and the ladder and I was moving on to my next job. Happy customer and happy handyman (with quite sore arms from all the cutting).
Screw it! 