The rest of the floor!

So this weekend we are laying the tubing for the rest of the floor. This requires more use of the orange tamping machine. However this time I got to run it! Which is why there are no lovely pictures of me working hard. It also required this laser level. NOT my best friend tonight. 

Curt would used the level to make sure the rocks were all at a uniform hight so the insulators would have an easier time laying the insulation. Which meant a lot of tamping and raking of rocks. He did seem to be a bit nit picky about this.

While I was doing that, Curt had to build a box for the fire place. Since it's needs a deeper concrete base then the rest of the floor. First he had to dig out all the rocks.

Then build the frame.

Place the frame in the hole and get it all even.

Apparently there was a warped piece of wood making the whole job a bit longer and frustrating than it should, requiring him to sit on the box to strap it down. This causing him to tell me his "buns were not up for that workout tonight". Which of course made me laugh and take a picture.

Portable Mill.

So the Wood Mizer arrived at our place on Wednesday. With a name like this I'm feeling pretty good about getting as much usable wood out of the beams that we can. :)

This is the portable mill. All very exciting. However pretty hard to blog about since I was not there. Curt took the few pictures I have. So I will let them speak for themselves today.

It even comes with the required DANGER notice where sometimes you have to wonder if they think all people are stupid.

And here are some of the finished product! Now all we need is the framers.

Wood Beams

So as you know from an earlier post, we have a large collection of recovered old fir wood beams. They are all going to be used for different purposes, but this first batch we are cutting up into 2x4's.

Curt has had this guy watching over them for the last few years. I'm not sure how much good it does, but he does seem to enjoy his job.

First I had to take my mom's metal detector and go over all of the beams and mark where there were nails. Curt then pulled them out. If the portable mill hits a nail, it's 30.00. So it's best to get rid of them now!

Then Curt had to come up with a great way to move them into the drive way. You can see the pully set up above the beams.

He tied a strap around the middle of the beam.

 Hooked it up to the pully.

 Pulled it up on to the cable.

And walked it across the driveway.

Depositing it into a new pile. This too quite a while I might add.

I found a much funner use for the cable. Zip line!!!

Finished Floor

The concrete guys came a couple days after the tubes were done and poured the first part of the floor.

After it had dried for a few days they come back and cut some lines in it so that hopefully (fingers crossed) the slab does not crack. So far so good! One week later, no cracks!

Next week, the 2nd part of the floor!!

Floor Heating!

 So the next step in the process is putting the heating in the floor! We are doing a radiant floor heat with a fireplace for supplemental heat in winter. The house faces to the south west and so catches as much heat from the sun that it can. Which will help a ton during the winter. The first step was to rent the machine you see Curt using above and packing down all of the rocks to get an even floor. Curt had the laser level out and was raking and packing. A lot of this boring stuff happens when I'm at home. I like the glamor jobs myself.

Then we had the rocks covered with a heavy sheet of plastic to keep out all of the damp, and then a 1 1/2" thick piece of insulation. That is what the blue stuff is.

 Next you lay down a metal grid and zip tie them together. I did this part, it's a bit like sewing, matching seams and stitching together to make it all even. Each square is 6" this way you can easily measure what you need the tubes to be at.

(A side note about zip ties, why do you think that the colorful zip ties are cheaper than the black zip ties. They are both the same length and strength, Do you think it's because most men are going to go for the black ones with out even looking at the price because, they are more manly looking and they don't want to look like a sissy? Well I went for the black ones at first, thinking there must be some reason for it. But as it turns out, there's not, so I went ahead and got the colorful ones on the next trip. I've not mentioned that it's actually been in the 80's the last week here in Bellingham, so what I did notice is that the colorful ones are not as hot to work with, from now on I'm sticking with the colored ones. )

This is how the grid looks all done.

A friend of ours that owns a heating company loaned us this great spool to put the tubing on. This makes life much easier and you don't have all the kinking up of tubes that you could. We were very grateful for this!

This is what it looks like when we got it all tied down. We have a graph that shows us where to put the tubes, some times its a foot wide and sometimes bigger, like in the bedroom where you don't really want it that warm at night. Closer in the bathroom where you really want it warm in the morning. 

These four tubes are two lengths of hose going from and returning to the boiler.

This is the bedroom, bathroom, laundry part of the house. They pour the floor tomorrow and then next weekend we will do the living, dining, kitchen part of the house.

I did mention that is has been super hot here for us Washingtonians. Between the 83 degree heat and the reflection off the insulation, we were roasting. Curt made his own little hat out of micro fiber towels. It kinda looks like a turban.............

1st half of August!

Finally somethings to blog about. As much as I wanted the house done by our Anniversary and my friend Mary comes to visit from Scotland, sometimes life gets in the way, or really bad plumbers. Needless to say, I'm not sure any work got done in July. Lets just not go there. But the next step is having the plumbing put in. Which required for some mysterious reason this giant load of sand.

Since our house is being built somewhat like commercial construction the plumbing gets put in the floor. So first trenches were dug.

 Curt did this part, since he wanted to make sure it all got put in right place.

 Pip really enjoyed the trenches.

 After it was all put in, sand being used in the trenches it was covered over with the rock.

 Looks like this.

 Now, when I mentioned bad plumbers what I mean by this is, Curt had to have them back out 3 times to fix mistakes and then he finally got so frustrated he fixed the last few things himself. (And this was supposed to be a really good plumber, one used before) However there is still one more thing to fix, they left a piece of rebar, sticking our of our floor! You can see it in the below picture. Since we don't want to be stubbing our toes on this vicious piece of metal (it has already drawn blood on my knee) it has to be removed before the floor gets poured. Curt just left to pull that out.

 All in all, plumbing is not that exciting to blog about, and even more boring to read about I'm sure.