Floors down

The pine floors installed. Notice also the woodstove is now set on the slate hearth. We'll get around to hooking it up soon. Oh yes, we also built a somewhat more expansive bottom step spilling out into the living space

Adam hard at work

The floor in process

Jake's tile work grouted and nearly done

Adam has been back up to help us out for the last two days and he and I managed to get the flooring down on the first floor. Due to some supply issues we went with 2" nails on the first floor instead of the 2 1/2" nails that Nancy and I used on the second floor. It was striking (no pun intended) how much easier the smaller nails were to nail in. Also, in a blessing from on high, the span of the main area of the living space on the first floor turns out to be just under sixteen feet wide and this allowed us to install our large stack of sixteen foot pine planking with no joints whatsoever on the first floor. I wish I could say I planned it, but I didn't -- it just worked out that way.

The next job for me is to set all the nails on both floors, which means hammering them with a tool called a nail set that submerges the nail heads roughly an eighth-inch below the finished the surface. This will make things good for next week when the floor sanding/finishing crew arrives to polish off the job.

Working alongside Adam and me today was Jake who is nearly done with the bathroom tiling project. The last remaining detail is to caulk the corner joints and then we are free to hook up the all the fixtures and call it a working bathroom. Maybe that'll happen this weekend?

Slate and Tile

Detail of the tile pattern in the shower

Our kitchen floor slate pattern. We were surprised, but not unhappy, at the color variety that falls under the "purple" designation. The little white things are spacers.

My main mission today was laying the hardi-backer, which is the cement board underlayment placed on the floor before the slate floor goes down. Luckily, Jake was here working on the downstairs shower and so was able to guide me as I mixed the mortar and tried my hand at a process I'd never done before. It went just fine and worked out nicely.

Meanwhile Jake was installing the tiling in the shower and did nice work. We changed our tile design after it became apparent that my original concept required tile sizes that were not available. Last night Nancy and I calculated the quantity of tile we had to work with and came up with a new horizontal-band concept that used the available tile well. Jake went to it and at the end of the day had two of the three walls complete. We're quite happy with the result.

Tomorrow Nancy and I are all set to install the slate in the kitchen. I laid out a box worth of the pattern and was both surprised and pleased at the color variation in the "purple" slate that we purchased. In reality there is a mix of gray and purple slates with some very interesting green spots among the purple. Nance commented that we had struggled over what color to go with and in the end kind of wound up with a little of both our choices.

We're both excited to put down this floor tomorrow.

Lowering three inches

The area under the shower mostly reframed, replumbed and ready for plywood

In this photo you can see the 3" drop into the shower as well as the drain flange.

Jake mortaring the cement board joints

I spent the best part of the last 3 days or so lowering the the floor of the shower stall by three inches. In one respect this might have been a pretty straightforward process, but in the course of thing required some re-plumbing and some tight-quarters support framing while maintaining the well being of the radiant tubing winding through the works.

Why am I lowering the shower floor, you might ask? Well, way back I investigated whether or not I'd need to lower the floor in order to have a pitched grade to the drain. To the extent that I looked into it I felt comfortable not doing so. Now, as I write about it it seems obvious: you can't have a pitched surface without going down (unless you build up to a threshold, which maybe I was thinking at some point.)

Once I had the structure rebuilt and the plywood base installed, then I had to install the cement board, which is the underlayment material for the tile. This stuff was comparatively easy and presented no problems.

This morning Jake, who is doing the tile work in the bathroom, arrived and I was able to keep just ahead of him. He laid the underlayment on the floor of the bathroom and then mortared the joints of the cement board that I'd installed. I also installed the drain base and mortared that as well. His next move is to apply a waterproofing membrane to the whole lower area of the shower pan area.