Glue and Screw

Last Friday night’s activity was installing the bathroom subfloor.  Very exciting.  There hasn’t been a solid floor in this bathroom probably since the house was built.  We destroyed what was there early on and have been dealing with a few pieces of plywood set down on top of the floor joists since.  It was workable but hardly ideal – it was uneven, there were still holes, and if you stepped in the wrong spot, you could still put a foot through the ceiling.  Now, we have a beautiful, solid, sturdy, flat, level, not-going-anywhere floor!

If you’re going to install tile, you need a heavy duty subfloor that’s 3/4 – 1” thick.  We got Advantech tongue and groove plywood specially designed for subfloors. This stuff is awesome. It even comes marked with where to place screws depending on your joist spacing.  Ours is irregular and with smaller spaces due to the sistered joists, so we had to draw our own lines, but basically, you use a lot of screws.  There was some work to get everything around the whole bathroom level – here’s a nice video from Home Renovision on how to level joists for subfloors. Subfloor should be attached with both glue and screws.  We used Loctite 400Subfloor adhesive and #9- 3” multi-purpose screws.  Shawn pre-drilled all the holes which was helpful and I screwed the boards down.  Really glad I got Shawn that impact driver for Christmas last year, it did a great job. 

Pro-tip: since these are tongue and groove, you want to be able to fit the boards together – don’t screw down the edge that’s going to connect with the next board or you won’t be able to slide the next board in place.  Wait til the boards are fitted and then screw the interfacing edge down. 

It’s incredible how solid this floor is.  I so wanted to get out my tap shoes but Shawn would kill me if I dented the subfloor.  So I had to be content with sautés instead 🙂