JoeFaeGlesga wrote:
Hi all,

I was planning on flooring my loft but there seem to be a lot of cables
crossing the beams. Obviously whoever rewired the house didn't really
use the loft so just threw the cables wherever to get to their
destination. IS it a difficult job to reroute these along joists etc.
Was maybe going to get a spark into do it but no idea the complexity of
th job....

Any advice appreciated.

The right way to do this is to drill holes in the centers of the joists,
and route all the cables through them.
However, barring a rewire, this probably isn't possible.

The trivial way is to take some wood of the same width as the joist, and
1/2" thick or so, and apply over the existing joists, not covering where
you want the cables.
This can be bits of the flooring chipboard or whatever.

The better way is to do this with 2" thick (or more - depending on the
thickness of your existing beams) of the same width as your joists, the
full width of the attic (removing a couple of tiles may make it easy to
get these in).

Take these beams, notch the bottom of them where the cables are needed
to pass through, then glue and screw to the existing beams.
This gives extra space for insulation, and makes the beams much firmer.