Mark Donovan of http://www.HomeAdditionPlus.com replaces a drywall attic door opening with a plywood insulated attic door opening.

Video Transcription

Hi! I am Mark Donovan from homeadditionplus.com. Today, we are going to replace this piece of broken drywall with a substantial piece of plywood and insulation behind it so that this attic opening is sealed properly. So the first thing I have done is I measured the opening and I am marking up the dimensions on a piece of half inch plywood. Next, using a circular saw, I am going to cut the board to length. Now, with our board cut to the appropriate attic space opening, I am going to lead this at the edge with a coarse piece of sand paper. Okay. So now that we completed the sanding out of the edges and the top surface, we are going to apply lacquer paint to this. So we will let this dry and while this is drying, we are going to work on the insulation portion of this attic opening. So now, we are going to purchase a piece of two feet by eight feet long rigid foam insulation that is two inches thick. This has an R-value of ten. I am going to cut this into thirds and stock it one on top of the other to give me an R-value of 30 and this will sit on top of the plywood or on the backside of the plywood to provide a nice insulated barrier from the opening of the attic entrance. Cut the rigid foam insulation. All I am using a utility knife. I made a mark for 32 inches in this case and just running my utility knife along the length of the insulation. Once we made a score, we can just cut it and we got our two pieces. To laminate the three sections of rigid foam insulation together, all I am using is duct tape. And for this type of light work, use duct tape to glue. So now you have three sections of two-inch rigid foam insulation laminated together to give me an R 30 factor of insulation. I am going to mound this to the backside of the plywood sheet. Now we got some duct tape to the top surface of the insulation. I have also put some glue around the surface as well and now we are going to mount the plywood wooden top. So we will let this dry and when it is fully dry, we will install it in the attic opening. So now we will remove the old piece of drywall. We will try our new door opening. It fits nice and flat up against the trim and it is nicely sealed. So that is it. We got a nice tightly sealed attic door opening and we should save on our energy bills this winter. If you have any other home improvement question, visit us at homeadditionplus.com today.