It's Cool, But Is It On The Level?

Stable flooring application requires a level substrate. The closet in the studio was anything but, so I poured a couple buckets of self-leveling compound in there and was both amazed at how glass-like the finish was and appalled by how little distance two buckets of this expensive stuff goes. Time constraints being what they were, we laid floor in a semi-level closet. Eh ... heh.

Quite White

What do you do when cats pee so much and in such concentrated areas that the urine seeps through the underlayment and into the subfloor? You paint everything white with an oil-based shelac called Kills. Seal it in, baby.

Here's a funny story ...

You might be wondering why a row of bricks are missing from the wall above the sliding glass door that leads from our dining area to the front deck. No? Well, I'll tell ya the story anyway. It seems that the original builders didn't use the correct support structures to hold the concrete deck in place. As a result the deck has slowly sagged, and with it the entire house in that area. The solution is to brace the garage opening, jack up the wall, remove the bad wood (rotted out by bad drainage, animals and a longstanding heater leak) and replace it with an engineered beam suitable for bearing the existing load. Jacking the wall without removing those bricks (and the sliding doors) could be a disaster, so better safe than incredibly depressed at having one more, new huge project to take on.

"It Is A Dream I Have"

It was an exciting day indeed when I was able to order then pick up the radiant panels and flooring for the studio. We decided to go with a floated floor of Australian Cedar. The planks are quite thin and are NOT nailed into the subfloor. The wood is "manufactured," not a laminate, which means it has cross hatches of wood topped with several millimeters of real Australian Cypress: enough for a few sandings if warranted down the line.



The point of this is to create an extremely dimensionally stable flooring which will resist expansion, warping and cupping in the face of radiant heat exposure. Floating the floor gives it an added advantage of being able to move independently from the expansion and contraction of the panels themselves. This is not the studio. Its the living room. I wanted to expose the materials to humidity levels within the house for several days prior to installation.

A Different Kind of Tracing

So this is what an electrical engineer does on his day off. My father-in-law was kind enough to spend a few hours getting to the bottom of a wiring situation I created for myself by not properly labeling what I was taking apart and rearranging in the studio ceiling. Lesson learned. Since Norm helped get to the bottom of my problem I thought I'd return the favor and post a bottom of his.