How To Finish An Attic With Trusses

Attic floors are made with floor joists or with truss members.

How to finish an attic with trusses.

If the roof slope is steeper than 9 inches in 12 inches of run it doesn t take much width to end up with a nice room 12 feet wide with an 8 foot ceiling. The role of the horizontal beam is to tie the truss together and carry the load that would otherwise be sustained by the support and vertical timber also known as the king post. If you re finishing your attic insulating it to the proper r value can cause a dramatic loss of headroom if you limit yourself to fiberglass batts. This framing style typically provides the most open space in an attic.

Your attic is not suitable for storage because the bottom member of a typical truss referred to as a cord is not designed to support a storage load not because of truss movement. If you have trusses it will be next to impossible to reconfigure them to allow for clear space. If you have a rafter framed attic the floor joists may or may not be large enough for living space and may need to be reinforced or replaced. The rooms in the attic trusses depend on the length of the truss and the pitch or steepness of the roof.

The longer the truss and the steeper the roof pitch the larger the room. If you have attic trusses not conventional trusses the members will be sized to support living space. To meet all three goals insulating your finished attic ventilating the roof and maximizing headroom use a combination of dense batt insulation rigid foam sheeting and air chutes. Trusses are like big structural triangles that have angled top pieces that serve as rafters horizontal pieces that serve as floor joists and interconnecting web pieces that give the triangle strength.

Do you need a crane to set attic trusses. Newer truss framed roofs are made with prefabricated trusses. Trusses are considered a superior method of framing a roof because of the additional support. I have this above my own garage.

The conditions necessary to produce attic trusses are now in place. Attic conversions are now possible by replacing the truss rafters with a shaped trusses or horizontal beams which in return create additional space. Ironically though it s the rafters that provide a better environment for an attic conversion because of the clear space. If your attic joists won t bear the weight necessary to finish out a living space but the engineer cleared them to support floor decking for light storage you can install inch plywood or.

Yes you ll need a crane because a typical attic truss weighs well over 100 pounds. It s safer to use a crane for all.