1. Yes. 2. 5/8" cabinet grade plywood is fine. 3. Piano hinge is fine, but I'd laminate a 5/8" x 5/8" edge to the door for best screw holding. 4 & 5. Fine.

Hi Joseph,

Thanks so much for answering all these questions. (You've answered our queries before and I have high confidence in your skill.) For #5, which approach would you use--ripping a sliver of floorboard, or trying to conceal the area with baseboard and quarter-round?

--adam

Thank you, Patricia. That's a good suggestion. We're going to get a ladder as well, but I think we're required to maintain this exit just to meet city codes (there are no exterior stairs on the back).

I have never heard this to be code a 2 storey house with an attic conversion and interior stairs in my experience only requires an egress window and a ladder that folds out from the window. The only trap doors I have ever seen in a house are to get to the root cellar. Maybe we need a bit more info

HI Patricia,

We're on the third floor of a 3-story condo, so the stairs are the shared rear-fire exit for the ground floor and second floor residents as well. Montreal mandates a physical route of egress, but almost all fire escapes here are internal.

Thank you,

Adam

If I were in your shoes, I’d probably buy a fire-rated access door specifically built for egress. Said-door will have the same look from above as the door in your example, but it’ll be much easier to open in case of emergency.

"For #5, which approach would you use--ripping a sliver of floorboard, or trying to conceal the area with baseboard and quarter-round?"

Hard to say from the picture. Maybe make up a little mock-up of each. I'm leaning toward sliver of floorboard though.

Hi AB
We are looking to build something very similar at our house. I would love your advice on what hinges, pulls, shocks to use. Thank you!

Hey Lizzy,

We're on vacation, so can't send you photos (and unfortunately don't know the brands we used).

But we did end up using piano hinges. And a recessed pull latch, designed to lay flush with the floor when not being used.

We did not end up using shocks. We have never actually need to use the door since installing it and our contractor correctly convinced us that shocks would therefore be overkill. So the door is heavy and could slam if used often, but is never used.

We did not end up "framing" the edges around the trapdoor with a different kind of edging lumber. Instead, we glued and nailed our normal tongue-and-groove wood directly to the back of the trapdoor so that it now looks contiguous with the surrounding floor. It's a quieter, smoother effect.

So it's our normal tongue and groove flooring that actually forms the "border" of the door--and it stays in pattern with the rest of the floor. There's no visual interruption from the trapdoor. We chopped flooring strips with a chopsaw so that they "jump" the gap between surrounding floor and trapdoor without interrupting the flooring pattern.

We calculated so that one side of the rectangular gap of the trapdoor hole coincided with a full strip of flooring, which therefore served as an edge.

We then installed the remaining strips onto the trapdoor in situ. (I think the trapdoor's back is clad in normal subflooring.)

We glued and nail-gunned the strips into place (using a handheld nailgun because a full flooring gun with pneumatic hammer strike would've caused the strips to budge/slide out of place; there's no back-stop strip.)

We used wedged quarters or nickels (can't remember) to create a consistent gap between the normal flooring and the flooring strips nailed to the trapdoor on the free-swinging side and the top and bottom sides.

Hope that helps.

--AB