Heat and Floors?

 

We lost our drywall Pros to other jobs in late December and January, but they assured us that since we were ready for them to finish upstairs, they would give us the whole month of February. In the meantime, the boys hung drywall downstairs.

I was often asked what we had to do to get in, and here is what once inspector told: heat, a full bathroom, a kitchen sink and washable surface in the kitchen. Seems so simple, right? But in reality it wasn't that minimal and those few things did not come very fast. That orange coil meant that the in-floor heat was on its way, but we were nowhere near a kitchen sink install.

Around that time I learned how to make a house disappear. This information was from a friend who wanted to build on their acreage without taking down the existing (perfectly fine) structure. They said they were told by their county that they would have to either tear down the other house or just take out the stove. So I wondered: if you take a stove out of a house it is considered “torn down," so if we just put a stove in would we get our occupancy certificate? 

Somewhere behind this tangle of plumbing, electrical and radiant heating lines is a bathtub. We missed a fantastic opportunity to put the radiant heating lines UNDER the tub. It was in the plans but somehow things got re-routed and forgotten. 

The shiny brass knobs of the radiant heating manifold. They look like you would be able to control things with them but we actually have not figured out the fine-tuning yet. 

We had to shift some things around on our house calendar because of the delay in the drywall progress. Having a calendar planning night was really good for us during that time, it helped us to see what was coming up and realize what we had to research and order. Every time we drop off the planning, work seems to slow to a halt. 

(Don't get excited; those prices are really old)

 One of the things we decided we could start doing while waiting for the drywall was shop around for flooring. We did stop at a flooring store to see if we could plan that purchase, but the salesman didn’t seem to know much and we felt like we wasted our time.  Flooring couldn't go down until the walls were done anyway.  

The order things should be done for wood floors was sometimes hard to juggle in my mind. The purchase and delivery had to be just so for timing. For instance, we wanted to paint the walls first. Although you are supposed to let your wood floors sit in the house weeks before you lay them, you are not supposed to acclimate wood flooring when there is paint drying (it adds too much humidity I guess). So you can't paint the walls if your flooring is already delivered and acclimating. Oh, and the radiant floor heat had to be installed and you don't want stacks of flooring in the way, so paint then heat. And the weather affects wood flooring installation. By the time I counted up the rest of the delays I could see there wasn't any hope of ordering flooring anytime soon. At least we were beginning the process of thinking about it!

Here's a cross-section of what we were looking at, adhered to some plywood. My husband wasn't exactly impressed with this stuff. 

Stair backing also had to be thought about. More things to add to the list. 

I would like to say our new year's work was "cut out for us" but the fact was we DIY-ers had to do all the cutting! I couldn't wait until something could be bought pre-made and installed, like a cupboard!