Although electric under-floor heat in the bathrooms uses a fair bit of energy (9 watts per heated square foot), it is a little luxury that we can choose to use or not to warm our feet in the cool of our winters.

We bought the Flextherm heating system kit, which includes the appropriate length of green-covered heating cable for the size of the room, as well as round guides for the wire. The thermostat is purchased separately. I chose to donate the guides to the Habitat For Humanity Restore (whence cometh many of our building materials).

The Flexsnap system

Instead, I purchased the Flexsnap 12″ gridded squares to clip the wire into. It is easier, will raise the level of the tile equal to the 3/4″ fir flooring that meets it at the doorway, and at $2 each, for a small room, I thought I could justify the expense. Another advantage is that they stabilize the floor so that a second layer of plywood is not necessary before tiling. Some internet research suggested that one could just hot-glue the wires in place, forget about the guides or gridded squares. I’m very glad I didn’t try cheaping out on that step. It would have been constricting, and I would fret over whether I was damaging the wires.

The orange Flexsnap blocks are quick to install directly onto the plywood sub-floor with screws.

The heating cable clips into the tiles, 3 or 4 inches apart. It starts near the thermostat.

After installing, the wire needs to be checked with an ohmmeter (or multimeter) to make sure it is conducting electricity/verifying the resistance/not broken.

I’ve spent far too many hours cutting the white 1″ square tiles out of the all-white 12″ blocks of tiles and replacing them with brown ones. 88 x 25 = 2200!

The "renovated" bathroom tiles.

I hot-glued them into place, but found when it came time to install them, many of the brown tiles fell out of the blocks. Just made more work. I learned that only good-quality large glue sticks work, not the little craft sticks.

All the voids in the Flexsnap tiles have to be filled with the flat part of the trowel before the notched trowel is used to raise the mortar to accept the ceramic tiles. The 88 square feet of floor used up four 50-lb bags of polymer-modified mortar.

Raff came to help, mixing the polymer-modified mortar in the wheelbarrow for me, so I could steadily apply the tiles on top of the Flextherm  heating wires. This made the job go much more smoothly.

The bathroom floor

We’re leaving the basement floor finished as concrete. After curing for a few months, we had the floor sanded to take the paint/stains/construction glue off. It did not really smooth the finish that much. However, we decided to add some warmth to the finish by acid-etching the concrete. This only works on clean concrete.

The materials and help came from StarPatch in Burnaby.

The first sample in a closet. Note the staining on the wall. This is a 1:1 concentration of copper first, with a full concentration of terra cotta on top. We decided it was too dark.

So I tried a full concentration of copper in another closet, and masked off the wall first. This was better.

After cleaning, all the walls were masked.

Copper is sprayed on, full strength.

Terra cotta is sprayed on along the grid lines. It is the acid yellow colour when it first goes on.

Drying/the acid reaction requires at least 4 hours. I left it overnight. Then, the chemistry is brought to neutral with the application of baking soda water. The floor is mopped and flooded about 10 times until the rinse water runs clear.

a view of the gridded floor

The bedroom just has copper, with a bit of terra cotta around the edge, no grid. After the staining is thoroughly cleaned/rinsed off and dried, water-based acrylic sealer is applied. It intensifies the colour.

After a week of waiting for trades to show up when they promised earlier in the week, they all showed up on Friday.

The upshot of the day’s labour is that we have LIGHTS,

These are temporary light fixtures while we do all the finishing activities that might break the permanent fixtures

we have HOT WATER, and we have a massive cabinet in the bedroom/bathroom.

The cabinet/furniture maker is Vincent Lang, who has a workshop near Sechelt. He has built the unit (and the kitchen cabinets) out of formaldehyde-free 3/4″ plywood. I was able to choose the alder veneer before it was laid up, and Vincent custom-mixed the stain, finishing the cover coat with a tough, green finish, as well as designed the doors to match a photograph of a cabinet I showed him from a magazine. Local trade, quality construction (included mortise and tenon drawers, soft-closing hardware, etc.) No particle board in our house if I can help it! I confess that a flood in our apartment convinced us that particle board cabinetry, such as the IKEA cabinets, falls apart when it gets wet. Not sustainable.

The bedroom side of the cabinet

A view of the bathroom side of the cabinet. Hardware is yet to be installed.

Plus, I filled in my spare time cleaning and cutting flooring to its useful length. Very satisfying progress.

On demand hot water heater

Let me tell you about the hot water heater. It’s a Navien CR180 on demand gas fixture, which claims 98% energy efficiency, “the highest in the industry.” And “best gallons per minute performance when comparing input BTU.” It has to be vented on an outside wall. We considered a re-circulating booster, which would deliver the hot water instantaneously, keeping all the pipes filled with hot water.  We decided against it because of course, it requires more fuel to keep it instantly ready. So now the question is: do we just let the initial (cold) water out of the faucet go down the drain? When we get the $ together to install a solar hot water booster, the water going into the tank will be hot on sunny days, but it still won’t deliver hot water until the pipes have been emptied of their room temperature water.

Reporting some green news! Extra, extra, read all about it!

D and I started the reclaimed fir flooring yesterday. Regular readers will recall that I have collected about 5 batches of beautiful used fir flooring that I found on Craigslist. I think it should be enough to finish the whole main floor (about 1200 sq. ft.), but if it isn’t, I’ll haunt CL for some more.

When we built our first house in 1980, we did learn that re-using old fixtures and building materials has its attendant problems. Our experiences with used building materials this time around confirms our past experience. For instance, even though this tongue & groove fir flooring is purported to be 3.25 inches wide and .75″ thick, it varies by 1/8″ in both dimensions. That means it’s challenging/impossible to produce a flat, crack-free surface.

Here’s our process:

Ends are trimmed clean, and broken edges cut off. I'm trying to organize the prepared pieces by length, but my boss didn't let me get very far ahead of him.

Most of the board tongues and grooves are covered with dirt/gunge/paint/insect husks, which will impede their ability to fit tightly together. I scrape the gunge off. To me, the wood smells like old churches. I don't know why.

How-to web sites recommend laying down building paper ("15 pound felt"). The purpose is to help prevent creaks and movement of dust through the layers. Makes sense to us.

D framed the heating vents with a fir box.

A long strip is temporarily nailed on to guide the first two strips to keep them parallel to the wall. A 1/2" expansion space is allowed next to the wall.

The first strip is face-nailed. Holes will be filled during re-finishing.

D then uses his fancy-schmancy floor nailer to shoot 2" L-shaped (heads) nails into the top of the tongue. He nails near every joist, but not on the joist, because he might hit the screws that hold the plywood onto the joists. If he hits a screw or nail, the nail gun could jam. Flooring must run at right angles to the joists, to prevent flex. Any joins in the flooring need to fall at a joist, for the same reason.

This is how much we got done in a day-and-a-half. You can see the dramatic variations in colour. Some of that will remain after refinishing, but much will sand off. The scuffs and gouges will be smoothed out some, but we appreciate the fact that it has been used, and think that it adds to the charm and warmth of the floor. What you can't see very well here are the variations in the strips' widths and thickness. And, in spite of our precautions and trimming, one board squeaks, likely because the bottom groove was missing, so there is flex. No board is perfect when you're using reclaimed flooring. We will screw this board from the top, and cover the screw head with a plug.

With the belt sander, I decided to see how easy it is to sand the edges (these will be partly covered by a huge cupboard unit tomorrow). You can more easily see the variations in thickness when the sanding highlights them. It was not too time-consuming to sand this much. The industrial sander should level out the floor better.

My feet are in a bucket of water. Just checking to see if you’re reading to the end!

There hasn’t been much progress in the “green” department. We’re just painting and cleaning forever, and D has installed the T&G bedroom ceiling.

But, this week, John the electrician has been wiring the studio building, which readers will recall has been formed with Logix insulated concrete forms. There are 3 inches of styrofoam on the outside and on the inside walls.

So, the usual installation methods don’t work. Rather, John has become a styrofoam sculptor, carving out the shapes of the fixtures, affixing the wires somehow, then covering up the work with new styrofoam.

100 amp panel just for the studio

carved styrofoam channel for wire

Single or double wires just sit there. More wires in a channel need to be affixed to wood.

Then a new styrofoam strip packs the cavity to keep the wires out of harm's way (wall finish)

I was interested in a textured finish that looks like clay/adobe. Although the product American Clay looks amazing, it is quite challenging to apply, and the professionals have to take an extensive course before you hire them. Too expensive and easy to marr.

Home Hardware markets a line of wall finish called Flexrock. It is not called a paint, per se, but you roll it on like paint. It dries very quickly, so you can only do a 3×3 foot section at a time. Depending on the texture you want, it can look like “suede, parchment, lace, or linen.” It was necessary to order it in large pails, which took about a week to come. It’s manufactured in St. Jacob’s, Ontario, or at least distributed from there. I don’t think it has a very long history, because the support material/phone contact lack a bunch of answers to questions I had.

Although the colour isn't accurate here, the texture of the finish is visible.

First, I experimented on some spare drywall. It claims not to need undercoating, but when I applied a coat directly to un-primed drywall, it did not cover very well, and dried too fast to get the finish I was trying for. I think it has sand suspended in it. It is a water-based product, so very low VOCs.

I chose a creamy white for the base coat. Using very light finishes in our home will help to save energy, because we tend to turn on the lights later if the interior surfaces are reflecting a lot of light. I rolled it on with a 10 mm-thick roller, then with a dry roller, smoothed it out.

This is closer to the colour of the finish. You can also see our window trim here. We are planing pieces of fir flooring, reclaiming it and finishing it with water-based Varathane. If there are some nail holes evident, I think it's great - shows the character and origin of the old edge-grain fir that came out of Vancouver-area homes which were being demolished or renovated. One of the people who sold us some flooring were actually replacing this gorgeous stuff with laminate!

Because it’s so dry at this time of year, we lightly spritzed the wall with water.

A second colour, ever-so-slightly darker, is applied with the special roller covered with nailed-on suede fabric pieces.

Then, flattened out with a dry roller.

Immediately, it is “knocked down” with a plastic smoother.

It’s easy to apply, and is a very tough finish, hard to scratch, like plaster.

Also this week, Ron and I have been finishing the vaulted area in the living room before the scaffolding is removed and returned to the rental shop.

Here are before and after photos of the trim around the multi-lam beam and tongue-and-groove ceiling finish. Ron covered the beam with fir boards so it would look like the other big beams in the main living area.

"Before" trim

"After" trim

D and I were planning to do the painting ourselves, but I realized that it was a step that would hold up all the other steps/trades. In addition, it would monopolize all of D’s limited time at the house.

As a surprise for D, I made a rather impetuous decision to have the whole house primed and the ceilings double-coated in Benjamin Moore’s Aura (no VOCs).

After spraying, Chris rolls the finish smoother with an 18 or 20-inch roller. You can see my special finish in a cream colour behind Chris. I'll report on that later.

Are these professional guys fast! In two long days, with 25 gallons of paint, the job was done!

Our rinky-dink sprayer can't hold a candle to this spray apparatus.

Now we can install electrical fixtures and cabinets.

In the end, I was the one who was surprised when D first saw the house after two weeks away. He didn’t even notice that the painting was done!

A huge crew of nine good-looking young fellows arrived first thing yesterday to do the final pour/placement.

The torch-on sealing around a post and roof-downpipe

But, first, before my female readers or gay men get too excited, I’ll show you the preparation required to get to this pour.

Steve the roofer installed a layer of “glass-based nail-down” and a very waterproof layer of “torch-on” (basically a tar).

To protect the fancy copper-coloured flashing (matches the roof), a 2x2 is inserted between the 2x10 and the flashing.

Then the building crew installed the complicated form for the 2″ concrete deck. To make it as water-shedding as possible, the concrete extends over the flashing 1.5″.

triangular drain strip

Denis, the concrete contractor,  suggested a tiny triangular strip atop the 1.5″ strip, to ensure that, if any water manages to get into the concrete, it gets drained out this little space. Any dripping from the deck that occurs does not drain directly onto the cedar trim, but further out.

stripped v-groove deck detail

A layer of 6mm plastic covers the tar to protect it from gouging by rocks in the concrete mix.

Two decks, two doorsteps, one bathroom floor, the studio floor and pony wall to hide the kiln, and three miscellaneous pads. All this with only 10 cubic meters of fly-ash concrete, and in 2.5 hours!

Stripped deck

finished upper deck

And, now, the concrete hunks:

Progress on the house has been slow this week. No one feels like working in this heat, so the guys go home early every day and take lots of days off.

The small developments:

Ronnie completed the last high angled shingling today, so the house looks better when you drive by.

Ron completes the angled shingling.

Steve has been torching-on the deck waterproofing in preparation for the concrete pour (studio floor and decks) possibly Tuesday.

Torch-on doorway detail

I have been mostly painting. One little job I’m particularly proud of is this vintage bathtub, another CraigsList find:

This side must have been placed against the wall in its last incarnation

orange and turquoise from the 60s, I'm guessing

I collected a photo of what I’d like it to look like.

This is a photo I found in a magazine

And then I painted it in a pretty good copy of the photo (I haven’t picked the flowers to put inside the bathtub yet.)

You can tell the colour change is intentional, right?

I’m chuffed about that.