Finishing the Bedroom Subfloor

This morning, I got an early start (and good thing lol) on removing those two sheets of plywood (a whole sheet and a cut sheet) to fill in the spaces underneath part of them with shims. Just removing the screws became an adventure in and of itself. A couple of the screws wouldn't come out, and a third came partway out; all three became stripped with the effort of trying to remove them. Well, that certainly wouldn't help in trying to get them out! All three of these were on the smaller, cut sheet (the first one I was trying to remove). It took a while, but I managed to get the plywood off by chiseling out one of the screws, while the other two had already bitten so deeply into the plywood when I screwed them in that it was no problem getting the plywood over them.

Of course, now I was left with three screws sticking out of the original floor! For one of the screws, I was able to gradually get it out by removing the screwdriver head (these floor screws have a special head that fits onto them; a flathead or Phillip's won't fit) from the drill and attaching it to my handheld interchangeable screwdriver, and putting some muscle behind it. The other two, however, were way too stripped for me to get them that way. I attempted using a pair of pliers to remove them, but they wouldn't budge. Other options came to mind, but the only one that seemed like it might work was the hacksaw. Of course the frame of the saw was too big to fit down on the floor level (where I needed it) to get cut those screws off flush with the floor, so I had to remove the blade and use it free-hand (with a glove on, of course!). After almost 10 minutes, I had barely made a dent in that screw. So much for that idea!

So, after an emergency phone call to the friend that's been helping me with the house, he suggested I try a pair of channel lock pliers. I didn't think that would work, since the regular pliers hadn't, but I was willing to give it a try. My backup plan was to drill holes in the floorboards next to each screw to wiggle them out if necessary. Fortunately, however, my friend is a genius and the channel locks worked fine. It took a little while, since I could only turn the pliers a small way each time (the screws, of course, were next to the wall), but I eventually worked them out.

Now I still had the other full-size sheet and a tiny filler piece to remove. The filler piece came out with no problem; after I ran into resistance with the full-size sheet, I realized I didn't really need to remove all of it, or even most of it; I just needed to remove enough screws to be able to lift the section that bowed down so I could slide the shims under it. And that's what I ended up doing.

Then, I needed to determine how thick the shims would have to be. I had figured a piece of luaun, or even a piece of plywood (1/8" for the luaun, 1/4" for the plywood) would be sufficient. It wasn't. For the far section, right along the bathroom wall, I ended up having to stack a cut 1x4 and a piece of luaun! Now, granted, the 1x4 isn't really an inch thick; it's really 3/4", but this all added up to 7/8"! I had no idea the floor sloped that badly from the next-to-last joist to the one under the bathroom wall! In any case, I built that shim up, shoved some shims under the end of the full-size sheet, and then gradually worked my way back to the joist; the next one back was just a piece of plywood with a piece of luaun on top of it (the picture below just shows the plywood before I realized it would need the luaun as well).

There are still a couple of very small places under the plywood where it will bow down a bit if you step on it, but considering along this wall is either going to be a dresser or a bookcase, and thus no one will be walking on it, it should be fine. I was so thrilled when I finally was able to add those pieces of plywood back in place!

And that just left the closet. So, I measured that space, the cut out the appropriate size from the last sheet of plywood, and lo and behold, it actually fit into the space! That just left the door threshold for the closet. I had considered doing a single piece for the closet floor and the threshold, but figured why bother wasting time trying to get the dimensions just right when I could just do it as two pieces, which would be easier to get into the closet anyway? So, after measuing and cutting the threshold piece, I then discovered I'd overlooked something: The hardware that holds the bottom of the louvered door in place. At this point, I ended up outsmarting myself. I measured back to front to see how much of the board I should leave; then measured from left to right for how much to cut off. When I ended up cutting, I got confused and used both measurements for cutting off. So, when I put the piece back in place, I saw I had a much wider gap between the hardware and the end of the board. Oops!

Oh well, it's just the subfloor. When we do the laminate tomorrow, we can always stuff something in that little hole if necessary lol. The rest of the day I spent cleaning up the backyard a bit. And then updated this blog. And now, I'm about to go get ready for the auction tonight. It's Saturday, after all. I have a reputation to uphold! ;)