Boise Cascade has teamed up with National Lumber, one of the biggest lumberyard chains in the Northeast, to streamline subfloor installations. After cutting your Boise Cascade engineered joist package to rough length, National Lumber applies two beads of BC’s Floor Loc hot-melt adhesive to the top flange of each joist and then covers the adhesive with a strip of plastic for shipment to the site. When the joists are installed and it’s time to fasten the subfloor sheathing, the plastic is peeled back, the sheathing is dropped into place and nailed, and nobody gets construction adhesive on their clothes, on their hands, or worst of all, in their leg hair.

Unlike conventional subfloor adhesive, which skins over quickly and hardens like a rock over time, the Floor Loc adhesive has a 24-hour cure time and remains just a little flexible even after curing. According to BC, the flexibility allows the framing members and sheathing to expand and contract naturally without any chance of breaking the adhesive bond and causing squeaky floors.

What’s the cost of all of this? On our last build, it added $385 to our lumber order, which is about $100 more than I estimated for tubes of adhesive to glue the 140 sheets we used. But once you add in the labor savings, it’s hard to argue against this system. I’m a big fan, and so is my framing crew.

One catch: As of now, the Floor Loc system is available only through National Lumber’s eight New England locations, which are in Massachussetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. But an idea this good is bound to spread.