T&G Floors and Electrical
We began this week working on the Tongue and Groove flooring. One of the things you need to do here is
make provisions for any lighting or fans that may be mounted in the first floor ceilings. This requires a little
prior planning and a good router. It can be done by chiseling out a groove for the electric line but we found that
a router with a guide makes quick work of this task.
Here is the completed groove. As you can see sometimes you'll need to do a little "hand work" with the router
to remain out of the way of things like lag bolts and metal ties. In this case we had to clear both.
This groove will allow us to run the electrical wiring from one of the interior walls to the center of the master
bedroom ceiling. Once the groove reaches the wall a hole is drilled from the groove into the double top plate of
the 2 x 4 wall.
At the other end of the groove a hole is simply drilled straight down through the beam.
The electric line is then simply run up through the 2 x 4 wall into the groove and over to the center of the room
and down through the hole in the beam to its final location. Later a metal junction box will be recessed into the
bottom of the beam. This will be done in order to meet our local electrical code.
With the OSB down it can be nailed permanently in place. Extreme care must be taken when nailing above an
electrical line. We marked both on the tongue and groove and then on the OSB exactly where the line had been
run and took great care to make sure we nailed to one side of the line and not directly on top of it. Putting a nail
through an electric line will make it unusable which will create a host of new problems to solve.
Here you can see the results of the completed floor/ceiling. You can see the electric line for the ceiling fan in
the lower section of the picture.
One thing I forgot to mention is that before nailing the OSB in place construction adhesive is used to help
eliminate squeaking in the finished floor. Here you see the "boss" and her "glue" gun spreading the adhesive
for another sheet of OSB.
The dining room ceiling provided a new challenge. The spacing of the second floor beams required us to install
a cross beam so the light could be located in the center of the room. This was done by simply using 4 lag bolts
to secure the beam in place. Then the electrical line was run down a main beam and across to the middle of the
cross beam.
When using a router you can only go so far. When close to the wall it will be necessary to use a small chisel and
mallet to complete the groove for the electric line. In this case the line was run from the cross beam to the
groove in the wall and behind the OSB over to an adjoining interior wall. All this MUST be planned out before
doing this work. Trying to determine where you want to run the wires on an ad hock basis just won't work very
well.
This is a lesson learned the hard way. We realized that we had covered up a couple electrical holes when we
installed the OSB against the back wall. These holes were to carry the electrical lines for the back porch lights
and a flood light for the back yard. It took over 3 hours to locate, dig out the OSB and run these lines. The good
news is that this is a recessed area and will wind up being behind the rear wall.
In order to keep this from happening again we stopped what we were doing and ran all the rest of the lines up
to the second floor. We're not going to go through that again. Here is the box directly below the lines in the
previous picture. We had originally planned to run a couple of three way switches for the lights on the back
porch using a "switch, fixture, switch" wiring method. The hole up through the logs in the dining room became
plugged with debris sometime after assembly which made it impossible to run an electric line to the fixtures
from that switch. The solution was to change to a "switch, switch, fixture" wiring plan. The nice thing about
electrical wiring is that there is generally more than one way to do things. Looking back it might have been a
bit easier to run the wires when the wall was completed instead of waiting this long. One other thing to take
note of is the gap between the door jam and the buck. That will be dealt with in a moment.
One other little job that side tracked us for a while this week was a little experimenting with insulation around
doors and windows. We had used expandable spray foam insulation a long time ago and found that it expanded
too much no matter how little you used. This can be a problem when it comes to windows and doors because
over expanding foam can cause the frame to be pushed out of square and interfere with the operation of the
door or window. Here we are using "minimum expanding" foam. This stuff expands but not very much so it is
much easier to use.
If you noticed (two pictures up) there was about an inch gap between the door jam and the buck. Although this
gap will be covered with trim it needed to be filled to keep drafts and critters from coming through. Using the
minimum expanding foam it didn't take very long to completely fill this gap. Care must still be taken not to try
to put too much foam in the area all at once but if you take your time and don't try to fill the gap in one pass it's
pretty easy. This is by no way the only way to do this job. You can use conventional fiberglass to fill the gap if
you wish but we just found the foam easier.
The same foam was used around a couple windows in the laundry room and master bath to see how well it
sealed. We tried a couple different brands and to our surprise the "cheap" stuff worked better than the name
brand.
We didn't get quite as far as we wanted this week but everything that
was done would have had to be done eventually anyway so we really
didn't waste any time. We now have the majority of the second floor
completed and only lack the bonus room. The bonus room is directly
above the kitchen and there will be a lot of electrical lines that will have
to be run for ceiling fixtures in that area so we felt it would be better to
wait till Monday to start that section rather than to try to hurry the job
and risk the chance of making a mistake. We will complete the kitchen
ceiling/bonus room floor early next week and hopefully by the end of
the week have all the second floor walls framed as well.
Check back soon.