House Stuff
December 31, 2012
I hate tiling with the firey, burning passion of a million suns. I
tiled the floor, then spent a month getting the oozed up mortar out
of the grout lines with a dremel - modified thinset is too flexible for
the normal grout removal tool to touch, especially when it's in narrow
grout lines. But now? It is grouted and done.
September 16, 2012
So I finally have started putting down tile in the upstairs bathroom.
August 25, 2012
I never updated after getting the second kit installed. Apparently I was
too demoralized. Stuffing 2 pieces of Romex into a conduit proved to be
too much for the _conduit_ to take, and it came apart inside the wall.
So I had to rip the wall out to fix the broken conduit. As long as it
was out, I slid the cables through it out on the mezzanine, THEN put it
back into the wall.
This afternoon I poured the self-levelling cement stuff all over to smooth
around the wires. Once it sets, I can start putting down tile.
August 7, 2012
I gave up on waiting for their 24-hour tech support group to get back to
me, either by phone or email. I ripped out the one line I had through the
conduit, and slowly mashed two lines in. Needed more snot, preferrably less
blood. Blood is a lousy cable lubricant. Tonight I'll see about getting
the second kit installed, and if I'm really ambitious I'll see about mashing
the two lines from that kit up the next conduit. That'll give them a
day or two reprieve before I need an answer about cutting the power leads.
August 5, 2012
Well, that was a nice plan. Turns out the in-floor heating has incomplete
and contradictory instructions, and the power wires may not fit in the
*3* conduits I installed in the wall. The instructions insist on conduits,
1 for the power and 1 for the temperature probe. Since I was installing 2
kits, I added another power conduit. But the kit uses Romex (in-wall,
explicitly NOT in-conduit) and I have to mash 2 pieces in each power conduit.
I think what I installed was just too small. I'll probably end up pulling
out the one feed I've installed so far and try to mash them 2 at a time with
liberal use of "elephant snot" (lube intended for the purpose). Also,
the instructions say nothing of the electrical installation itself, but a
label on the wire says to not alter the length of the power leads... which
are 4' too long. I'm waiting for a call back from tech support, and I'm
now 2 days behind schedule. The instructions say that the installation can
be done in an hour.
August 4, 2012
While everyone except me is off at Pennsic, it's time to make progress.
I pulled the tile out that John had dry-fitted for the floor in the upstairs
bathroom, carefully sorted it so I can put the puzzle back together again
later, swept 47 times, and have started working on the floor for real. The
first step involved a special primer for the in-floor heating, followed by
(today) the heating system and the self-levelling mortar-like stuff to
fill in the gaps between the wires and under the tile.
Somewhere in there was were I realized that a heating system sized for
as 8'1"x9'4" room is not the same as when you subtract out all the fixtures
that you can't run under. I can cob together a good system from the parts
I bought for the downstairs bathrooms, but then I have nothing for those
and a spare system that turns out to be big enough for the kitchen. I had
no intention of doing this to the kitchen.
The rest of the floor plan (heh) is to buy the fastest, most expensive
materials - modified thinset (reqired by the heating system anyway) and the
epoxy grout. Yes, the epoxy stuff costs 5x as much per square foot of
coverage. But it takes 20% of the time for me to apply. And given what
the stuff costs relative to how I value my time... this just got expensive and
cheap at the same time.
July 21, 2012
Really? January? Argh.
Did a bit of work in the kitchen recently, finally boxing in the counter
with the dishwasher in it. I should have done that ages ago, since it cut
the noise of the dishwasher noticably.
We're now scheduled for late this month to have someone come in and fix
the plaster ceilings in the living room and foyer. It was starting to
get noticably worse, so it was time.
The shower upstairs had to have all of the tile grout cut out of the floor
and re-done. Best guess is that something in the floor flexes just a tiny
bit and the unmodified grout didn't like that. So now it's redone with epoxy
grout, which is the most flexible you can get. Also, the epoxy grout is
scary to use, and everyone warns about how touchy it is, but it is MUCH
easier than the "real" stuff. The only downside is that it's 5x the price.
When John and Amanda go off to Pennsic in a couple weeks I'm going to take the
opportunity to do the upstairs bathroom floor. I'll be the only one
inconvenienced.
January 12, 2012
There has actually been some progress recently, but since I haven't been
doing it, I haven't been able to remember to post. John has been working
diligently on getting the mosaic tile cut and dry-fit in the upstairs
bathroom for the entire floor. It's probably 95% there now. Once that's
done, I need a couple day stretch where we can't use that shower to put
down the heating system, pour out the self-levelling stuff on top of that,
then mortar down the tile. Once that's good and cured I can schedule another
2 day outage to grout.
2011 Archived Commentary
2010 Archived Commentary
2009 Archived Commentary
2008 Archived Commentary
2007 Archived Commentary
2006 Archived Commentary
2005 Archived Commentary
2004 Archived Commentary
2003 Archived Commentary
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