Hatching the loftyness

Every loft needs a hatch. We already have one, but as the boiler is located up there, the hatch needs to have an integral ladder, thus an upgrade was on the cards.


Before fitting the new hatch, the old one needed to be removed. Additionally the ceiling at the top of the stairs was false, taking nearly 75mm of headroom away, and the old light fitting needed to be disconnected and removed.

Pics to the left show the 'before' state - the second is the point where the false ceiling stops, the original ceiling above is painted turquoise..!





Above the plasterboard was a lot of timber 63x38mm C16 CLS - that ceiling wasn't going to fall down any time soon. In pulling it down carefully I managed to salvage a lot of the quite hefty screws used to put it up - these were used later on on the new ceiling joists.






To the left shows just the hatch remaining on the original ceiling.









The hatch came out quite easily, along with the opening for the earlier original hatch around it.

At the same time I started cutting the original plasterboard in the position I wanted the new hatch. Irritatingly it's neither the same size, or in the same place as the hole I have already. You can see the joists which will need trimming.

Cutting the joist was quite simple and easy, given their structural nature, I spent more time finessing the position of the new noggins (hammer-time!)








Once they were in and fixed the new hatch lining was fitted once I'd separated it from the hatch and ladder (it's quite a heavy lift otherwise). I had to guess a bit on it's height, as I intended to plasterboard over the exising ceiling, and wanted to get a fairly flush finish.








Fitting the hatch and ladder was quite simple once the lining was in place. The ladder had to be trimmed to suit the still quite low headroom - the ladder is good for 2.8m originally. To acheive this I opted to trip a tread of both lower sections, rather than two treads off the bottom, this made for a shorter swing out, as the original full length mid section got very close to the airing cupboard door.

I had to stop for the day at that point, as I'd not got drywall screws long enough to go through 2 layers of plaster.

The following day (after a trip to collect the right size screws) I started boarding over the old ceiling - this was done with leftovers from the false walls - hence the blue board - it's much heavier and quite floppy compared to normal plasterboard, and not my favourite building

material, however it it saves having to go out and fetch more plasterboard then it's good enough. I also went about wiring in the new lights, which were recessed spots out of respect for the fact that the centre of the ceiling now has a door in it. They pick up off a junction box in the loft which was connected to the old ceiling rose. There's an additional spur from the JB to another spot position over the top of the stairs.

I could now go about finishing off the loft floor, which I managed most of (bar 4 panels) by the end of the day.

There's more plasterboard to go on the ceiling above the stairs, and then we can think about plastering and final finishes in that area.