Red Echo

April 12, 2007

Busy day today. I took Shane (the MacBook) over to Heden and spent the morning there working. At elevenish the drywall contractors came over and spent a few minutes looking over the room. They made an estimate, I liked it, and they’ll be back tomorrow to start work. Lunchtime, afternoon, more coding, fixed some bugs, remained stuck on the one bug I was really trying to fix. Done with work, I put a third and hopefully final coat of red paint on the wall of my new room.

Once done and cleaned up, I met Adam H. over at Home Depot and picked up some parts for the next stage of our Rocket Factory project. We’d planned to build a stairway up to the storage loft, but Adam noticed some neat already-assembled folding attic-stairs kits, and after some hemming and hawing we decided prefab was the way to go. We cut a hole in the floor, repositioned a joist, cut and fit some more 2x4s, and mounted the stair gizmo. It works well: folds up and out of the way when it’s not in use, fits flush against the ceiling, and comes down easily with a little pull-cord. We felt happy.

After dinner with Janet L. at Jules Maes we went back and tidied the floor up a bit: reinforced the outer edge of the floor, added some extra corner braces, and hung up our clock and whiteboard. (We’re engineers: whiteboards are an essential thinking tool.)

Okay, time for bed. More bugs to fix tomorrow.

5 Comments

  1. I hope you used something more substantial than 2×4’s to hang the stairs from. Hard to tell from your post.
    Stairs should be hung from something as substantial as a joist and really from something that has been doubled up to bridge between two joists.
    That way you can drive in nice big screws (3″ wood screws) as all the weight is held by the upper end of the hangers.

    That makes it about a 2 x 10 or more depending on the age of construction

    Comment by norm — April 13, 2007 @ 7:33 am

  2. Just an FYI. If the stairs you got are the kind that fold up into the ceiling you may want to be careful about how frequently you raise and lower the stairs. From past experience with those types of stairs, the hinges tend to break after frequent use. Hopefully the design has been improved since I’ve had to deal with one.

    Comment by Rachel — April 13, 2007 @ 8:40 am

  3. Hmmm, yes, that was a hasty description. We built this loft on top of one of the building’s main structural members, a pair of 3x10s spaced about 3 inches apart, which conveniently happens to run 8 feet off the floor of the shop and about 6 feet away from the wall. The loft joists run from the wall across the big beam. Further, there is a 6×8 crossmember running from the main beam through the interior wall out to the next main beam, off in someone else’s space.

    The attic ladder thingie comes in a frame about 22″ wide by 4′ long. We mounted it at the corner of these two beams. We attached one long side to the crossmember, one short side to the one of the 3x10s, and the other long side to one of our floor joists. Only the other short side is actually suspended from a 2×4, which runs between the floor joist and the big crossmember.

    Comment by mars — April 13, 2007 @ 8:51 am

  4. Ah, thanks for the heads-up, Rachel. Maybe we’ll end up replacing it with a proper fixed stairway someday. Well, it was only $80 in parts and about two hours of labor, so even if it only gets us through the summer while we’re setting the place up, I think we can call that a success.

    Comment by mars — April 13, 2007 @ 8:55 am

  5. Sounds like you could have hung the Titanic off that :)

    Comment by norm — April 13, 2007 @ 7:01 pm