Building a Large Mezzanine Loft By Myself - FULL BUILD

What's happening guys today? I'm going to

build

a

loft

in my garage. Ok guys, in case you missed my last video, I'm

build

ing a

loft

and halfpipe in my garage and I was able to order and get all the wood. It was delivered here a couple of days ago, so it was a big help to do all the planning and designing from the beginning so I knew exactly how much wood I needed and that even allowed me to estimate and determine exactly what screws and how many I would need, so I was able to order everything and they brought it right to my house and here I have the wood separated into two separate piles so this pile is for the loft and that pile over there is for the halfpipe so I'm going to focus on getting the loft done first, so I'll quickly go over what I have, so I have three 6x6 posts here, those will be the posts that hold up the free hanging side of the loft and then next to them I have the two by ten by twelve feet. and that's what will create the loft floor structure and lastly underneath I have a 3/4 inch OSB subfloor and that's tongue and groove as you can see.

I cleared the area here for the halfpipe and the loft, so this is First, in the section we're going to work on today, I'm going to place the stud plate on this wall, so to do that I need to figure out and mark where they are. all my uprights. I know they are two-by-six studs. and are 24 inches on center. I have a stud finder and I also have a lot of good photos from when we built the place. I'll use two of the two-by-ten's on this stretch, it's about 19 feet from that wall. up to here and I'm going to have to cut one of them to go over the door as you probably saw in my design.

Okay, now I have my first choice board held in place with just some regular screws, but what I'm doing. I'm actually going to use these 3/8 inch by 4 inch lags, these are going to be a lot stronger than just regular wood screws so for these I have to drill a pilot hole which I think is 1560 quarts and then I can move on forward. and drive them in and I'm also going to use washers so I'm going to put some of these on the first joist plate and then I'm going to nail the second one and then I'm going to install these lags on each stud. of course, completely by chance, the end of my 2 by 10 is exactly where a stud is where I want to secure it, so now I'm going to try to cut this as it is here on the wall with a circular saw.

Now I have my truss plate

full

y secured and I'll be honest this is probably overkill with the amount of lags I put on this basically every two feet there are three but you know I want this to be really strong and you might land there with a bike and I'm going to put a lot of shelves there and store a lot of parts, so better safe than sorry. I'm missing a few, as you can see, I need to go, probably ask for more delays, I only need three more to finish it. but I got the cut that lines up pretty well.

I ended up boring these last three here because I know a joist is going to go in around that area, so I need to have this counter board so my joists can sit flush with the joist plate. Now I can start working with the six by six posts and I'm going to use these post bases and they're pretty nice because you just slide the post right on top of there and they're secured to the ground, it's going to be a single 3/8 lag made for concrete, like this that I'll have to drill into the concrete first and then put a single lag in there in the middle, so I'll just have to measure and make sure they're all in the right place, but then I can secure them to the floor and then I'll work on the posts.

I'm going to notch the posts at the top and I think overall they should be shortened a little. too and then once I've got them done I can start working on the beam plate for this side which will sit on top of the posts. Okay, now lay out all my posts and the plates of my choice, so now I'm going to work on this first floor beam here and that should square everything up and then from there I can start working my way down. I think I'll stick with 14 inches on center. I'll try to see what it looks like and then go from there.

I know I'll have the first few spaced out quite a bit because that's where I really want to make sure it's strong and I'm dealing with this clipping so I'll have them pretty close together and then from there maybe I can move on to liking it. 16 inches on center to bottom, this will definitely take me some time to do

myself

, but I will use joist hangers. Try to use them to my advantage. Put them first and that will give me some sort of advantage. Extra hand to get it up there and then screw it on the other side.

Now I have all the floor joists. That took some time, but it turned out pretty well. It really wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I did it on my own so I ended up making 14 inches on center for all the studs and so far I have the stud supports on the side of the wall here and now I'm going to go back and add the stud supports on this side as well. that's just going to add a little more strength so you're not just relying on the screws coming from the outside, which now I just made three on each beam so I can go back and put on the beam supports that will distribute the load. over more screws to make it stronger and then I'm also going to duplicate this beam plate on this side as you can see I have the post cut to allow for that so I'm going to add another layer of plate on the outside with these and I think I'll glue it on and I'll screw it to the original which should make it super strong and eliminate any chance of flexing in that board and then once that's done I'll be ready to start laying down the OSB subfloor. that I have here and it should be pretty easy because it's exactly 12 feet wide so I won't have to cut as much.

I think I'll just have to cut two sheets when I get to the back wall, okay? The Loft is complete. I got this, the second layer of the header here, which turned out really well. I glued and screwed them together. I also added all of these beam supports now on this side, so I have them on both sides. I also had to add some support where the plywood pieces came together, this would be on the sides that aren't tongue and groove, so unfortunately these came together right out of the stud, so to

full

y support I put in some of these jumpers I think that every two feet and that really made it feel solid up there.

I had to do that in two places. Also here you can see that the split was right between those two beams, so I put in all those supports. I also made a completely solid bridge. Here I would like to eventually do everything, but I was left without two for ten. The first ones are the most important in my setup anyway because I have these two that are a little weaker because I tilted them up and Once I have the half-pipe here, you could go up and do like a stop right on this first one, so it's nice to have those bridges there, it kind of distributes the load when you hit really hard across some other beams and these.

The angled sections came out pretty much as I expected. I'm pretty confident in how strong he is. I have so many delays on this header. Here, in fact, there's one right there that joins this into a two-by-six behind the wall, so I'm. I don't care too much about how strong it is and here at this door I had to do something funny. I knew I was going to have to do something like this when I designed it, even though this may seem like an afterthought. It was good. conscious and placed the ceiling height where it is on purpose, so I had to make these cutouts so that when you open the door it clears every two by ten, this last one came a lot closer than I thought.

I really do not know. I know why that happened, but it's clear and untouched and you can open the door all the way with no problem, so this probably wasn't the perfectly correct way to do it, but I have so many floor joists around here that there are 14 in the center. and this last pair is actually closer as it worked, so I'm not worried at all about the strength of this up here, the plywood fell very smoothly. I started here on this end with this back part. one and then I went out to this one, I made sure it was nice and tight with the tongue and groove, then I did this outside and then the exact same thing on the next row and then the last row was the one I had to cut so I'm going against the structure of my

building

here, so I cut this one out a little bit more so there wouldn't be a big hole there.

I already went ahead and moved one of my lights so you can see where the other two are. This one was hanging quite far away here, so I moved it so it's more centered in the loft area and also tightened it down tight so you don't hit your head. add more lighting here but having just that one is honestly pretty cool, it depends on what exactly I want to do here, if it's just going to be storage or if I want it to be more of a gathering area maybe I'll do that. something else with the lighting.

I know I'll have to move a couple of these other lights once I build the ramp so you don't blow air out of the halfpipe and hit your head on a light. Yeah this thing is super solid there's no flexing or shaking or anything like that when you're up here you can jump up and down and you don't feel a thing it's amazing so I'm really happy with how the frame turned out on the floor. I think I'm going to paint this floor because it's just the OSB sheathing can break if you don't paint it so I'm going to put a couple coats of paint on it to hold it together and it will make it look a little better and I'll also put up some type of a railing here.

I wasn't in a rush to do it yet because I'm not sure exactly what I want to do, but I'll probably have a pretty simple railing on this edge. I won't put anything in the front because that's where you'll come out of the halfpipe and potentially land here or fall from here into the halfpipe and then once the halfpipe is done I'll probably put some normal stairs right here in this corner so that I'll be next to it. of the halfpipe like I showed it in my design and I think I'm going to build some kind of shelving here along this wall and maybe along that wall as well, so that'll be it for today guys.

I hope this helps you if you want to build something like this in your garage. I am by no means a professional but I tried to do my homework to make sure it was super strong and secure, like I said there are a few more details I can finish. Up but now I'm ready to start with the half bite.