1 1/4" tounge & groove plywood subfloor installed on top of the joists. Another tough day. Got on site at 5:00 and primed the plywood, then took a breakfast break. When we tried to assemble the deck we discovered that the T&G didn't mate properly, leaving a 1/2" gap between sheets. So, we had to pull them apart and shave off an 1/8" of shoulder from the tounges to get them to fit. At the end of the day we had all but one sheet installed, at 49 screws per sheet. My dear old dad dropped in to oversee the operation for a couple of days.
Lessons of the day:
- Don't trust T&G, measure the tounges and grooves to see if they'll actually fit.
- Just because your diagonals between corners are equal and thus your perimeter is square, doesn't mean your joists are also square and parallel. ( I had to sister a 2x4 to one of the joists to get the edge of one sheet on a nailing surface due to a non-parallel joist).
- Align subfloor at a snapped chalk line at some reliably straight/square edge.
- Bessey clamps rule.
- Chalklines are quick and easy for aligning arrays of screws.
- Edge stapling the fibreglass insulation backing paper to the floor joist edges just makes installation of the subfloor harder, and gets all torn up when shifting sheets around, may not be really worthwhile.
- The squareness of every step (e.g. the posts, beams, joists, rims, etc.) adds up and contributes to the sqareness of subsequent steps. Corrections become more difficult as you go along
- Start square, strive for square, stay square as much as possible. Don't compromise your square. Think square, live square, be square. Square is good.
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