Chapter 2 - The Floor

Being a man, I have never truly experienced pregnancy. However, I imagine that it is a lot like building a house… Actually, being a man, I imagine that building a house is a lot more painful, for me at least, than being pregnant.

That said, memory of the pain fades with time and somehow we seemed to get sucked in for a second project. "Oh sure honey, we can do that, no problem." Somehow, we managed to forget how much "fun" it was to remodel the house, while we still had time to change our minds about this - much bigger, more complicated - project. Oh well, live and learn...

Ok, all cynicism aside, we finished the foundation on Friday and started right into the floor on Saturday. This chapter deals with the saga that is the floor construction. Thus far, the hardest part of building the floor has been deciding what type of floor we should build. We both really want radiant heat and we would prefer to have a suspended concrete slab. Owens Corning makes a terrific product called Lite Deck that we really want to try. However, Lite Deck is VERY expensive and concrete and steel prices are rising every day.

The alternative is to use wood flooring materials, which really aren’t that much cheaper and will not give us the results that we want – warm floors that really hold the heat. We flip-flopped several times, and finally decided that we should bite the bullet and do the concrete floor.

With the decision behind us, we started to tear down the bracing and build some temporary walls that will help to support the lite deck while the concrete sets up. Here are some pictures of the weary couple, the braces coming down, the walls going up and the three walls in place.

Stay tuned for more on the floor as we progress. Just in case you care, we plan to start installing the lite deck the weekend of 7/24 and we hope to pour the floor before August 1st (because concrete prices are going to go up!)

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