Wire Lath Is the Tool Of Satan

Wire lath and screw nails. Both. Tools. Of. Satan.

I knuckled down to do some perfectly straightforward destruction this afternoon. Needed to yank up a tile floor. Shouldn't be a big deal - you slam a big heavy sledgehammer into it, it cracks into a dozen pieces, you throw it in a garbage can. Lather, rinse, repeat. In an hour you're done.

Enter Team Whackadoo. They laid down a layer of wire lath first (we posted about its virtues, in a NON-INSANE application, HERE) and nailed it down with SCREW NAILS. So the mudbed is adhered to the lath. If it were not adhered to lath, I could get a crowbar under it and use it's inherent brittleness to crack it and pull it right up. But the lath is very, very flexible. It holds the mudbed together, even after it's cracked in a million pieces, and keeps it very firmly attached to the floor with SCREW NAILS.

Let me tell you about screw nails for a minute. Screw nails are for exterior applications. They're good for nailing on shingles in a wind-shear environment. They're for nailing together the structural members of your house that you NEVER EVER WANT TO TAKE APART. So why are they to be found every damn where in our house? Screw nails holding on molding? Seventeen of them holding down a 4"x4" square of floor patching? (I counted, as I cursed.) Someone on Team Whackadoo just loved him some screw nails. He had a big old 20lb bucket of them, and by god he put every single one into his house. There are so many screw nails in this house, I imagine if you hovered a large enough magnet over our roof, we'd fly away like the house in Up.

But back to the floor.

Wait, no, not back to the floor. Screw the floor. With screw nails.