Subfloor Installation and Ripping Framing

After the insulation comes the subfloor.  I knew I had just barely enough well cured (2+ years air-dried) lumber so I took it all over to my friend Tom's and we made quite a pile of wood shavings running it all through the planer to get a consistent thickness of 1 and 13/16 inches.

Good for the composting toilet and pee bucket!

The first step was getting the biscuit joiner setup properly.  Start by cutting a slot and putting in a biscuit, then marking a line with a very sharp pencil where the edge of the board meets the biscuit.

The flip the biscuit around in the same slot and make another line where the biscuit and board edge meet.  I marked the side from the first line with sharpie so it was easy to tell what was going on.

Then pull it out and look at the two lines.  Depending on your biscuit size, mine are #20, the largest, you should have some gap, in my case about 1/16" plus.  This gap will allow room for glue which I hope I'll not need as these biscuits are made super dry so they swell some and should be dually clamped by the boards as the boards lose some of their residual moisture.

Getting the first subfloor board in place using clamps to remove the bow.

You can see a bit of the bow here.

Using special "wood to metal" screws to make this all happen in one step.

They're not cheap though, 60cents each for screws meant to fasten 2" lumber into .25" steel.  I got a box of 200 totaling $135 or so shipped.

Whitecap had the best price by far, others wanted almost double.

Don't try to remove the bow too much or this may happen.  Fortunately not a big deal here.

Big Progress!

Home-sawn lumber is far from lumber yard lumber.  I decided to rip the edge of the first full length section so things would be a little more even the rest of the way.

I taught Sera how to do all the steps necessary and she was quick to take over the subfloor.
 

So I got to ripping 2x4's into 2x3's for the framing.  Setting up the rip guide.

And...ripping!

 I really liked sitting on the board.  It was a good position to push from (as opposed to working from the side) and my weight kept the boards from sliding on the saw horses.

A few butt scooches later.

Voila! (Almost)