6x2s attic joists. How much weight can they take

yoloc

A friend of ours is moving away to canada in few weeks time and she's was asking my sister can she store her stuff in her attic while she's living over there. She's sold off all her unwanted stuff in a car boot sale but is left with about 300kg of items she needs stored while shes away.

My sister asked me to have a look in her attic to see if it will be ok to store this stuff there, but after i had a look at her joist, im not to sure. Here below in the picture you can see that the joist are running from the front to the back of the house, but the only room she has to store this stuff would be where the other joist are running in a opposite direction and this is above the landing upstairs but theres no support underneath.

This house was built about 10-15 years ago and the roof was built in a traditional cut roof and the joists are 6x2s. Can anyone explain why someone would run the joists in 2 different directions like you see here in the picture below. Any jobs ive worked on, the joists have all be running from back to front. I dont understand why a roof would be built in this way.

With the roof being built like this, im wondering could the 6x2s be able to take this load without any major problems. I cant see a load, off 300kg max snap these 6x2s but would the ceiling sag and cause any problems with the plasterwork.

archtech

Get an engineer to have a look at it. It's a structural issue

mickdw

The walls shown left and right of the stair area in your diagram are most likely not load bearing and as such a different arrangement was used for the joists so all that stair area (joists running top to bottom in your diagram) is now carried off the double joist shown and the wall/joist at bottom edge of your diagram.
Obviously this would need to be professionally looked at but that double joist would appear to be carrying a large area of the roof so I wouldnt be loading that with anything without professional advice.

yoloc

<snip>

Mod: Structural issues are not to be discussed on the forum. Please contact an appropriate professional for any and all structural advice.