First post on here, please bear with me.
First, the basics:
I live in a timber framed 11-year old detached house with a large loft/attic area. As far as I can tell, there’s a slight overhang on both the front and back sides (the rafters are oriented such that if you sliced back to front, the cross section of the roof would be triangular).
We have solar on the front side of the roof, and no skylights or anything else in the rear side.
We’ve previously had some loft conversion companies out to price up but it was all too expensive. They seemed fairly confident they could convert, though. I don’t recall if this was without steels or not, this was a few years ago.
The trusses are all W shaped, and span the entire ~9m width of the house. They are held together by those metal plates with teeth in.
The overall idea:
I’d like, at least initially, to change the W trusses to a loft shape. To do so, I’d install uprights front and back, remove the bottom part of the middle ^ of the W, and then install a cross bar across the top, attaching to the triangle part of the rafters and the upper part of the middle ^ of the W. I’d then take out the remaining \ and / parts of the W truss.
So, my question is - is this crazy? Will my roof collapse if I do this all the way along? Do I need to get a structural engineer out to give me an opinion?
The other part of my plan is that, with the wood removed from the first W, I’d hope to repurpose this into the uprights and crossbar for the next rafter, and so on. My hope is that this would save considerably on timber costs. My suspicion is that this increases the risk of disaster!
Any thoughts, hints, tips, or “oh god no, never do this”, greatly appreciated!
First, the basics:
I live in a timber framed 11-year old detached house with a large loft/attic area. As far as I can tell, there’s a slight overhang on both the front and back sides (the rafters are oriented such that if you sliced back to front, the cross section of the roof would be triangular).
We have solar on the front side of the roof, and no skylights or anything else in the rear side.
We’ve previously had some loft conversion companies out to price up but it was all too expensive. They seemed fairly confident they could convert, though. I don’t recall if this was without steels or not, this was a few years ago.
The trusses are all W shaped, and span the entire ~9m width of the house. They are held together by those metal plates with teeth in.
The overall idea:
I’d like, at least initially, to change the W trusses to a loft shape. To do so, I’d install uprights front and back, remove the bottom part of the middle ^ of the W, and then install a cross bar across the top, attaching to the triangle part of the rafters and the upper part of the middle ^ of the W. I’d then take out the remaining \ and / parts of the W truss.
So, my question is - is this crazy? Will my roof collapse if I do this all the way along? Do I need to get a structural engineer out to give me an opinion?
The other part of my plan is that, with the wood removed from the first W, I’d hope to repurpose this into the uprights and crossbar for the next rafter, and so on. My hope is that this would save considerably on timber costs. My suspicion is that this increases the risk of disaster!
Any thoughts, hints, tips, or “oh god no, never do this”, greatly appreciated!
