Flooring

Now for the big job, putting in 1,000 square feet of flooring. For a couple years I had been keeping my eye on some new products for installing flooring over concrete. Two competitors existed, SubFlor and DriCore. These are two-foot square flakeboard pieces with plastic "feet" to hold them up above the concrete surface.

The plastic feet provide a dead air space under the sub flooring, helping with insulation. The plastic provides a vapor barrier effect as well. In addition, if a minimum amount of water should leak in, the lift of the feet will provide a place for that water to work its way to the floor drain. However, understand that we are talking very small amounts of water! Nothing is going to be much help if you have the Mississippi river coming in your window.
We ended up going with DriCore mainly because of superior distribution. When we contacted SubFlor, we learned that the product was not yet in the local Lowes stores, but would be "soon". What soon meant was not clear. When I talked with DriCore, they also revealed that the local stores did not yet have product, but they immediately put me in contact with a Home Depot in Nebraska that would ship it to me. Shipping was a little high, but I really wanted to use this since I intended to lay down bamboo flooring.
The DriCore instructions actually suggest that you install the product on the floors first, and then build your walls on top of it. That does not work well here in Colorado, since our expansive soils demand the construction of floating walls. What this meant to me was that I had to cut the DriCore to get it through doorways and such

Kind of a pain, and certainly time consuming. However, a jig saw with an aggressive tooth profile cuts both the flake board and the plastic subsurface just fine.
The edges of the panels are tongue and grooved. A simple blow from a rubber mallet would drive the panels together, locking them quite tightly.

I used a small scrap stick to keep from hitting the panel edges themselves. I figured that the blows could not be helpful for the tongues!

You can see some odd panels up against the walls on the edges of the room. The instructions called for a 1/4" gap between the edge of the drywall and the edge of the DriCore. I accomplished this gap by placing these scrap bits of 1/4" hardboard as shims.