Not really a gadget, but I’m going to ramble on about this anyway in case anyone else purchased one. This weekend Aldi were selling three-section loft ladders for £39. Poppy and I turned up just as the shop opened on Sunday and managed to buy one of the last three (the final two went within seconds after we grabbed ours). Once home, it was obvious why it was only £39 as opposed to the £80 I paid a few years back for one. The ladder was slightly warped and some of the holes required for attaching fittings to the aluminium were missing.. but these were easily solved with drills and brute force.
Once I had built a new rafter to fix the ladder to, it was reasonably simple to attach the brackets… however I did need to make several modifications to get this working properly. First up, by default when you pull the ladder down it keeps on coming until it hits two aluminium stops on the tracks (shown in the piccy to the left). This position is not ideal because it not only bends the pivot arm inside the loft, it also means that it comes down way too far and when you fully extend the ladder you have to push the whole thing back up in to the loft. I solved this by moving the two plastic stoppers when stop it from coming off the rails when you push it up in to the loft back up the the top so it can just hang there. The problem with doing that is that it now falls off the tracks when you push it back up in to the loft! So I took the no longer used aluminium stops from the top of the ladders, drilled new holes near the bottom and put them there instead, like in this piccy.
