Floors and Fireplace

Spent the weekend in Morzine. Drove the family down on Friday arriving about 10 ish.
Determined to do some electrics this week end and try and move the next two bedrooms along. Saturday morning and I was fixing the door frame up on bedroom number four hammering in big nails when instead of hammering the nail I hammered my left index finger. Full on smashed it! Oh my! painful.
It is two days later and its all gone black and swollen to twice its size and is still totally agonizing when ever I bang it against anything.

Any way with this slight handicap I finished the door frame and started on the underfloor electrics for bedroom 3. One handed electrics!

I wanted to start on the tiles in the entrance and in order to do this I was going to use Robs idea of bolting the floor down where ever it moved. So I drilled the holes put the bolts in, tightened up the bolts fixing the floor down. It worked very well but the next phase is to grind off all but a sliver of the nut so it can be tiled over. OK I need the grinder. I cant find the grinder, somehow it must be in Robs chalet locked away out of my reach. So now I have these bolts sticking up out of the floor about 5 cm just right for catching feet o, right in the entrance to the house and whats more they stick up so far I cant actually get the door open past them! I have to go out via the ground floor bedroom and round to see if I can get into Robs chalet and locate the grinder. Well I cant get to where I need to be. But I still have a door that will not open. In the end I get a metal blade for the jig saw and slice off as much as I can with that which although leaving a fairly lethal spike in the floor at least the door opens now! Ok this is not going to work so I wrap up the ends of the bolts and tell the family really clearly to avoid them. This pretty much guarantees that one of them will stub or spike them selves on them by the end oif the weekend.
My wife suggests that we do the dining room floor. Right. Underfloor heating and laminate flooring. What could go wrong? Well remarkably little actually.
We cleared the room and laid down the black foam underlay for the heating.

This we nailed down to the chipboard to keep it from rolling around. Next we taped down the heating elements. Not quite in the recommended pattern as the kitchen breakfast bar had moved forward by about half a meter meaning the heating elements would no longer fit sideways. We hastily improvised and laid them long ways leaving one left over which I will put in the entrance under the tiles. (good job I had not done the tiles today!)

Then comes the laminate

 

Each section needs to tapped into place and every other section I would bash my finger so the laminate proceeded slowly across the floor as the air filled with blue swear words. The floor was 5cm bigger than two sections of laminate which meant both ends needed to be cut.

All the wires for the heating elements have to be routed back to the thermostat and the temperature sensor needs placing in the floor but it all went quite well 

So well in fact that my wife insisted that we do our bedroom the next day.
The bedroom does not have any underfloor heating so the laminate so it went down onto the thin (3mm) white foam underlay.

 

Then the laminate on top, bit better sized this time not quite so many cuts.

 

 Again the flooring proceeded across the floor accompanied by much swearing and cursing as I bumped and knocked my finger.  My wife was amazing and ended up doing most (if not all) the hammering.

Monday morning and before we left I wanted to get the fireplace finished so the floor up in the salon could be thought about. So I dissembled the dalek and moved it off to one side, then constructed a wooden frame and filled it with broken tiles from the garden where I seem to have a huge supply.

 

Then mix up four bags of morter and spread out

 This will have tiles on it and then I will put the dalek back on top.

We all signed the slab, packed up the car and drove home.