How to Construct an Attic Bedroom

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to construct an attic bedroom. Now adding an attic bedroom is a great way to add square footage onto your home with utilizing some existing space that's already there. And now when we're looking at constructing and finishing out an attic bedroom there is certain things we got to do. First you want to make sure you do a good gauge check, and you can either do this yourself instead of going down and meet with your building codes, doing up a sketch, bringing in some measurements of what you want to finish out. And they can help you as far as making sure that the space meets minimum requirements to make it a livable space. And some things that are going to come into play is you've got to have a minimum ceiling height for the space and it's got to be a certain width and usually about half the room has to be at your minimum ceiling height. Okay. So that's the first thing you're going to look at. And then the next thing is you're going to have to have a window that meets the minimum size for egress. Now one thing I recommend if you do take an attic space and convert it to a bedroom, keep in mind there is only one access that way, and then you have this window. So it's a good idea to get one of these, and what this is, this is an emergency ladder that if there was an emergency and your person up here occupating this room had to egress, they'd open the window, this attaches over the window, and then the ladder would drop down allowing them to be able to get out. So that's an important consideration in a finished attic room. Now something comes into play is that we've got to make accommodations up here for some of the storage space and also for some equipment that may be up in here. So these are knee walls that are built up and typically this is about as low as you want to get, these are about four foot knee walls. As you can see we have got these doors that we built in and this gives us access to our HVAC system that happens to be up here. So the furnaced portion of the HVAC is right here. And you also - one thing that works very well is using recessed lighting. Again you're not going to typically have a lot of ceiling height, you're going to have usually minimum ceiling heights you're working with, when you finish out this attic space, so using recessed lighting is another good way to go about it. So I'm Tim Gipson talking to you about finishing out an attic space for a bedroom."