time for (heated) flooring.

In addition to the whirlpool tub, we thought it seemed nice to have a heated floor. Especially since it would be tile. Especially since it's a small space, so the heat from the floor radiating may just heat the whole room and we can close off the heater vent. And, especially since I had run a spare circuit that only had two outlets on it, and the flooring element only uses 12W per square foot (the space is 50 square feet). Oh, and lastly... because all the walls were torn up and we were starting from scratch, as opposed to trying to wire the programmable control in an existing wall.

So it would be relatively painless, and provide another bit of luxury.

And, finding both the programmable thermostat (there really is no point in having a heated floor you have to get out of bed to turn on, seriously) and the floor element on Ebay for half the cost of Home Depot sealed the deal.

On President's Day, we got to work... With the electrical box already wired and ready to go, all we had to do was layout the mat and run the wires - electrical from the mat to the box, and the floor sensor from the box to the middle of the mat.

The electrical cable was sort of thick, so I took my plunge router to the subfloor to cut out a channel -

We then just stapled along both edges of the mat and cut it to fit the 90º corner to the other door -

The point the manual makes is to test the resistance and continuity of the floor sensor wire and mat power leads, respectively. So before laying the first tile we tested each, first the resistance of the floor sensor -

The ohm meter read 17.73 (20k ohm scale, so about 18,000 ohms) which was exactly what it should be based on the temperature of the room.

The white/green and black/green measure no continuity (which was correct), and the white and black did (also correct) -

So the mat and sensor worked. Time to lay some tile! We decided we wanted a dark, not-shiny grey tile like this (well, not that crazy pattern - but that color and sheen) -

And when we were at Lowe's picking up I-forget-what for this bathroom, we wandered through the tile aisle and found six cases of tile on clearance ($30/dozen) - so we bought all six! Scott and I worked together to mix the mortar and lay the tiles -

The tricky part was the transition of tiles above the mat to just bare subfloor, and keeping them level with each other. So with each tile we'd check level, lengthwise and widthwise -

Cutting the hole for the toilet trap was fun (nice photo Scott heh!) -

And one corner done!

All of the whole tiles are laid. Now I'll spend the evenings with the tile saw in the bathroom cutting the rest of the tiles around all of the edges, before mixing up another batch of mortar and laying them. Then we'll need to grout and the flooring will be done!

Next up... walls (and more tiling)...