I love the sound of TapCons in the evening

It was back to work in earnest tonight, and that meant my absolute most favorite job of all - TapCons!

Golly! Gee! Barf! Wurp!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we could start hammer drilling, we had to find a solution for the bathroom floor. I don't think I've explained the problem here (though god knows I've bitched about it to enough people in person), so maybe I'll start with that and then segue into the pictures, mmkay?

So before our hiatus we were working merrily away on the subfloor, what with the foam (and finger) cutting and the plywood sawing and the tapcon swearing... er, drilling, when we started wondering about the toilet flange. (Or, as they call it at plumbing supply stores, the "closet flange". Sounds a little bit snooty, if you ask me, but then I suppose calling it the "shitter thingie" wouldn't quite cut it either.) When we poured the concrete for it, the concrete came up to the edges of the flange. This was as our plumber intended because somehow, someway, he either forgot or was never told that we intended to put a subfloor in the bathroom, the finished height of which (including cork tiles) would be about two inches. Fortunately, they DO make extensions for "closet flanges", but unfortunately (and of course) the extensions have a maximum height of an inch and a half - after which the toilet gets wobbly or something, I don't know.

Which meant that we kinda needed to reconsider our options. Our plumber recommended that we just tile the floor instead, which would take only about an inch, inch and a quarter of height. The problem with tiles is that a) the War Department doesn't want tiles; and b) (like there needs to be a 'b'), to put tiles down we'd have to remove the paint from the concrete floor (or the bed of thinset wouldn't adhere). Removing the paint would require renting a serious piece of machinery, and probably involve a weekend's worth of hard labour. Boo to that.

The other option was to jackhammer the concrete around the toilet flange and have Leonard come back and redo it. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Shyeah, right.

So we needed to find another way of insulating the concrete from the subfloor and still have enough room for plywood and tiles. It was when we were poking around at Rona when we found some big-ass rolls of this stuff. Essentially, it's the same material used to insulate ducting, but made to go under concrete, or between concrete and carpet. Well, we figured, if it works between concrete and carpet, it will work between concrete and plywood. The Building Code only requires vapour barrier (a stupid idea when you're just going to put holes in it anyway), and this stuff is air-tight anyway. Best of all, it's only about a quarter of an inch thick and still has a respectable R-value for insulating the floor from the cold of the concrete.

So we spent Saturday and Sunday picking up materials and cutting out the pieces for the bathroom. After dry fitting them on Monday night to make sure they'd work, we put them down and started putting in the TapCons!

Here's the bathroom floor all clean and ready to go:



And here it is with its shiny new jacket of rFoil:



And here it is with the plywood on top and about half of the TapCons in place:



Just so you can appreciate the sheer joy of TapCons, I took a quick picture of the tools necessary to actually put in each one:



Visible in that picture are:

• Steve's green hammer drill, used to make the hole into which the Tapcon goes.


• Amy's yellow drill, used to make a little countersink to make sure the head of the TapCon is flush with the subfloor.


• My grey drill, used to drive the TapCon into place


• The shop vac, used to suck all the crap out of the hole before driving the TapCon into it (so that the dust doesn't compact into the bottom of the hole, thus preventing the TapCon from going all the way in - that's a good time right there, that is).


• A spare packet of TapCons because I always underestimate how many I'm going to destroy trying to get them to go in straight


• A small pile of used masonry bits, munged TapCons, and snapped driver bits


• A hammer, used for flinging across the room at something when you snap your last drill bit five minutes after Canadian Tire closes.

Good times, good times.

Tomorrow night, we hope to finish the TapCons in the bathroom, which means, come Saturday, it's time to insulate! Wooo!




If anyone needs me, I'll be downstairs, patching up the hammer-shaped hole in the wall.