No Cold Feet
The clock is ticking on getting the upstairs bathroom in shape for guests that are due in August. The house layout is such that to get to the downstairs bathroom (the only one currently), you must pass through the two office/guest rooms. I'd like for that bathroom to be a private one for guests when they're staying, but that requires having the upstairs one functioning.
The rough plumbing for the upstairs bath was completed over a year ago, but before I can install the fixtures, I need to tile the floor.
At various intervals over the past year, I've done work towards preparing the floor for tiling. I cleaned up the sub-floor by replacing some of the weaker planks with 3/4" plywood, and I leveled it as much as possible shimming here and there. Around Christmas, I installed the Durock cement backer board and with help from my brother temporarily installed a toilet so there were two available in the house over the holidays. (The toilet came back out when I was plastering the walls.)
Last week I installed an electric radiant heat mat so that our toes will stay warm in the winter. This heat mat goes on top of the cement backer board and gets covered with thin set mortar when the tile is installed. It runs off a 120V circuit and has its own thermostat/timer to control its operation.
When I wired the upstairs, I hadn't planned on installing radiant heat in the bathroom so I needed to cut a hole in my newly plastered wall for the electrical box that houses the thermostat, and then fish wires through the wall from the floor up to the box. I'll grab power from the bathroom's receptacle circuit that is protected by a 15amp breaker and a GFCI switch. The circuit itself can actually handle 20amps but the radiant floor mat specifies no more than 15.
Once I had the box installed and the wires pulled, I layed out the mat and stapled it to the Durock to hold in place. I then chiseled a trough in the Durock to route the wires from the base of the wall to the mat, and used hot glue to fill the trough and hold the wire in place.
Now, when the tiles arrive, I'll be ready to start mixing mortar.
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