Boarding over loft insulation

Idiophreak

benjus wrote: »

Fixing them to the existing joists is easy - just hammer in nails diagonally from both sides.

Just to advise against this a little - hammering anything in the loft is generally a bad idea with plasterboard underneath - screwing's definitely the way forward...

Anyway, I found this thread whilst googling for my most recent project, so thought I'd hijack it - I'm living in a new-build flat and having just taken down the xmas tree for the first time (it's new ) have discovered that it's really quite heavy.

When we bought the house, we were advised that the loft wasn't designed for storage, because of the insulation and that we should limit it to xmas tree and suitcases if we could. Having stuck the tree up there, however, it was immediately obvious that it was going to knacker the effectiveness of the insulation pretty quickly - there's around 300mm of insulation in there and it compressed to around 100mm with the weight of the tree on. As a temporary solution, I've stuck it in the V of the wooden structure up there to keep it up off the insulation.

Longer term, however, I'm thinking that boarding the thing's the way forward - I'm a complete novice at any kinda DIY, but I'm sure I can manage to stick some batons down at 90' to the existing ones and stick some B&Q loft panels down on top (especially confident as the loft's the one place the OH won't see the results in order to criticise them )

Problem is, the joists up there are (as you might expect in new build) pretty small and the insulation is pretty thick - so there's around 6-8" of insulation above the joists all over...I'm a little concerned about the weight (and cost) of having to use 2"x7" batons or something, so have been toying with the idea of building little "boxes" out of 2x2...

Figure if I use 4"x2"x2" "uprights" to line up with each existing joist (60cm), a baton of 2x2 on the bottom and one on top, that will give me 8" total height, should be fairly strong, lighter (and, hopefully, cheaper) than a solid block and will give plenty of space for the insulation to breathe a little underneath.

So, my question - has anyone tried this? Or have any good reasons why it's lunacy?

Many thanks in advance