But still!
No big gaping holes into our crawl space.
No more need for sealing off the doors to the bathroom and laundry room during the week, and having to go out the back door and around the house to get to the garage.
And I tell ya, I smells SO much better in there when you open the door. No musty, damp smells coming from the crawlspace, just the pleasant scent of freshly cut wood.
Before we could even begin to measure and cut the subfloor, we had to install some joist bridging pieces, so our new subfloor would have something to screw into. Especially under the edge of the tub, where it was difficult to reach the next joist under the tub. Plus the edge of the old subfloor we were leaving needed something to attach to too.
The concept behind the joist bridging pieces wasn't hard, just cut 2' x 10's to fit between your joists and attach with long nails. But it was extremely awkward and time consuming to work under the floor. You'll notice the legs sticking out in the below photo...
Finally though, we had enough edges to lay down new 1/2 inch subfloor. Which of course, was also time consuming, measuring and cutting, and checking, measuring and cutting some more. It was a rather awkward shape we needed to fill the gaps where the damaged subfloor was, and we also had to allow for the toilet hole.
Then we wanted to do another bridging piece in the laundry room, but this time to support part of the washer and dryer closet wall (which we totally would have just gotten rid of if there hadn't been plumbing in the closet wall). When we'd removed the vinyl flooring and other layers, we'd discovered that there hadn't even been original subfloor under this half of the closet wall framing, so we made horizontal 2' x 10' joint bridges, and used another piece on top of the bridges to help brace the closet wall. The small pieces at the top of the picture below were to support the subfloor itself.
Once the closet wall bracing was done, it was time for 1/2 inch subfloor in the laundry room. By the way, we chose to follow the Mike Holmes method and "glue it and screw it," so we used subfloor Liquid Nails on the top of the joists, then used #8 wood screws into the joists. And we left the required ~1/8th inch gap between our pieces of subfloor, to allow the wood room to expand and contract.
Finally, it was time for our 5/8ths inch layer of plywood! The 1/2 inch subfloor wasn't going to cut it for strength, usually closer to 3/4ths inch subfloor is recommended. But since we were working with part of the existing subfloor, we had to add another layer on top of everything to beef the floor up, so it would be solid enough to support our tile. As long as our 2nd layer of plywood's seams didn't line up with the subfloor, this is a good way to get your floors up to an acceptable thickness.
This isn't a great photo (the CFL bulbs we have in the work lights in here make taking clear photos really difficult!) but here you can see how the first and second layers of plywood don't have their seams lined up.
It's also important to securely screw the two layers of plywood together, but not screw the second layer into the studs. But we still have to do the screwing, which is on the agenda for tonight.
So. Subfloors, check. You'd think we'd be ready for drywall next, right? I wish!
But before we can put up walls, we need to install a new valve in our shower, to work with our new shower fixtures. The old one is an up and down valve, and we need a rotating one. No, those aren't the technical terms, but plumbing isn't my area of expertise! :)
And before drywall we also need to do some electrical work, adding another junction box. Our old light fixture was one of those cheap row-of-bare-bulbs kind, but we're going to be putting in two sconces on either side of the mirror instead.
Which means I need to share what we finally decided on for pretty new plumbing fixtures and light fixtures. Lighting especially took forever to figure out what
So more on the design updates coming soon, but that's it as far as the real project updates are concerned. We have plywood floors. And I'm oddly ecstatic about it. Baby steps to you, but a heck of a lot of time and work to get there to us!
7 comments:
This is so impressive! I've been too scared to even attempt our future bathroom reno. I love watching your progress. :)
Great progress over the past few days! I can't wait to see which type of lighting you selected. The lighting and fixtures sections were my favorite parts of the hardware store growing up :)
Great job!!! It's coming along!
Hooray for subfloors! It's all coming together, and I can only imagine how happy and proud you will feel when it's done!
wow--lots of hard work! great job!
hooray for new floors and a better smell :) you are getting so much done.
you are so smart to figure out your lighting and bath fixtures while you have the wall off. We were idiots and waited far into the process. We forgot to decide on the valve and were pretty limited.
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