Heavy Hardware / Subfloor

The entire family headed out early Monday morning to camp and arrived just past noon.  A slight delay in Erie to pick up some supplies at Home Depot and grab breakfast at Mickie D's had our drive time to just over 3 hours. Camp was absolutely beautiful.  Probably the most beautiful day that I can remember spending there in a long time, if ever.  The cool steady breeze and intermittent clouds blessed us with very tolerable temperatures (sweat shirt cool at times) and enough rays to get sunburned if you weren't careful!  Nick and Carly helped me out by pitching the stones that littered our excavated area into the woods.  Eradicating them from the flat is going to a chore that will need repeating many times.  In the course of their stone throwing adventure, they found two toads and played with them a while.  The wifey found switched from on the deck in bright sun to under the trees in the cool shade.   I, however, had work to do.  Beginning at 1PM through 5:30PM, I checked many tasks off my list of things to do.

It began with drilling 24 holes (48 times) first in 1/4" then in 1/2" diameters sizes, pounding in the 1/2" carriage bolts, installing the fender washers, lock washers and nuts.  Now the beams are done!  There are some spots where the center run of support doesn't hit the joists that run perpendicular across them, but this is due to putting the bowed side of the joist boards facing up.  In time and with the weight of the walls and roof, those few joists will settle flat and the structure will become even more solid than it already is now.

The tongue-n-groove 3/4" underlayment was installed long side parallel to the joists which required me to block between the joists where the end of two boards met.  This sorta killed two birds with one stone as I had planned to do a full run of blocking the left and right of the middle line of beams anyway.  I used liquid nails subfloor adhesive and 2 3/8" hot dipped nails to secure the sheets to the joists and experienced only one high spot at one seam.  I figure I'll take this down with a belt sander when we get to that point.  After reviewing the video above, I'm going to use the left over material and fill in the gap created at each end where the sub floor came in short on the 16' span.  I believe this was due to the fact that the boards aren't actually 4' wide.  Just a small difference adds up over that much width and this may have caused the 1/2" of gap at either end.  I've got enough material to make this gap disappear and will tackle that job when we begin to install the walls.  One more thing that I definitely wish to do is paint the entire underside of the floor, joists and beams.  I believe painting will assist in durability in the long run.

I left the structure covered with a doubled over camouflage tarp and built up a high side with the boards so that the water would run off the tarp and hopefully not pool on it.  The tarp is weighted down with bricks (we've got enough to go around!) and tied in a couple spots with twine to make sure it stays put until we get to the next stage.  "The next stage," you ask?  Stick framing!

Yes, the next time Floatman or I, or Floatman and I, hit TC...we're going to begin erecting the actual wall structure!  Won't that be fun.  I've been researching my rear-end off to be sure I know the process and I'm looking forward to the challenge.  Wish us luck!

Two weekends from now, we'll have our first family of visitors up at camp.  Jennifer and I invited our neighbors, Matt and Carol, up to camp along with their children.  To be completely honest, I'm looking forward to relaxing and partying with them.  Matt's a friggin' work-a-holic (I'd say like me, but he sets the bar a little higher than I'm even comfortable with) and I'm sure he'd enjoy the time away.  I'm also hoping that Floatman's clan can make it up to join us too.  The kids ages run a fairly broad spectrum, but I'm sure that we'll all have fun in the activities we've planned for the holiday weekend.  Let's be candid here, I've never been accused of being "really mature", so I'm just as much a kid as the rest of them.