47: Subfloor Complete

Lot’s of work has gotten done on the house. Too bad I haven’t been as productive at keeping the blog updated. As the title says, the subfloor is complete though the pic doesn't show that. Apparently I lost or misplaced my completed subfloor pics.

To keep everyone up to date, the subfloor is 3/4" tongue and groove OSB. It is glued down to the 2x10 floor joists with subfloor adhesive (very sticky stuff). Additionally it is screwed down with deck screws (25 screws per sheet). The hardest part of putting it down was getting the tongue and groove to line up with adjacent pieces, but the sometimes not very subtle use of a 3 lb sledge and a 2x4 wood block coaxed the tongue into the groove.

I noticed that as I got more and more of the subfloor installed, that the crawlspace was beginning to get darker and darker. So, I took a little break and installed most of the lighting in the crawlspace, approximately ten light fixtures, all of which have compact fluorescent bulbs to save a little on electricity. Why ten lights? I want plenty of light down there so I can crawl around to inspect for termites and anything else that might be down there. Every other light fixture has a single electric plug built into it, so I have plenty of places to plug an extension cord into if I need a little power to do something.

I used a lot of mismatched exterior latex paint from Walmart to coat the OSB as it went down for the subfloor. I’ve used orange, magenta, pink, tan, gray and off-white. Some of the floor has as many as three coats of paint on it, the rest two coats. All that painting helped because we had several really drenching rains over the summer and then capped it all off with the downpours from Hurricane’s Gustav and Ike. Surprisingly, the subfloor survived all the rain pretty well, though there are a few rough places.