Now that we had the floor all ripped out and put back in, we could finally start working on the radiant heat. We decided before we went to all that trouble we would go ahead and rip out the dropped ceiling that was over the bedroom. Of course the demo only took a good day, but dust would last for weeks. We were hanging new 2 x 10’s on Halloween night. At one point I literally left my wife holding one end of a beam while I went to answer the door. Hanging the insulation took another couple of days, and unfortunately the drywall is still pending. Getting the radiant up and going quickly became the main focus as the temperatures started dropping.

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Yep, as awful as it sounds, my wife’s birthday is actually the day after our anniversary. To those guys out there, you’re thinking, wow, hooked up. One gift, and you’re covered. No such luck. My wife is smarter than that. Before we got married she made me sign in ink, a statement saying I would never ever combine the two.
This year I splurged a little. My wife has always wanted an arco lamp. I obviously couldn’t afford the original made by Flos (ylighting has it for a mere $2,300). I had seen several knock offs around town (discussed here in the forums) but really didn’t like how far most of them strayed from the original design. I called a local store, By Design, to check prices and they told me they had a new model in that was almost exactly the same as the original. It sported a large square marble base and the square arch tubing. I went to look at it, and it was spot on. It is made in China, but the craftsmanship seems very quality. The original manufacture is italstudio mfg ltd. (no sign of them on the web) and it was apparently imported through Chair Tech out of Canada. The price was $400. While not exactly affordable for a floor lamp, compared to $2,300 it was a total steal.

Available from By Design for $400.

If you have been following the story of our house, you know what a mess I got myself into. Yesterday I explained how I started the demo for our radiant heat. Before I continue, I wanted to explain a little just how I planned on doing the radiant so you don’t think I was totally crazy. Where access from beneath is possible the most efficient way to add radiant heat to a wood subfloor is to run the tubing between the floor joists and staple it up with metal heat transfer plates. This is a fairly painless experience for those with full basements. My house had a 10′ by 10′ basement with 6 foot ceilings, about another 50% was crawl space ranging between 1′ and 3′ of clearance from floor joist to dirt. The remaining 40% above which I was currently doing the demo work mentioned previously had almost no clearance from below, making a staple up install impossible. There are plenty of above subfloor systems out there for the application I was planning on doing in the front of the house, most of which were quite costly. I opted for the DIY approach. It consists of ripping 9″ wide strips of plywood and attaching those to the subfloor 1″ apart

from eachother. This creates a groove which you can safely lay your tubing and heat transfer plates before putting your finished floor in. The obvious downside to this is the extra thickness of the floor. Because I didn’t want to have 3″ thick floors and 5′ door ways I decided I had to demo all the way down to the floor joists and level them out, install a new subfloor, the layer of radiant, and then the finished floor.

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We had always planned on tearing out our carpet in our house. The short neutral grey/brown pile just wasn’t doing it for us. We found our excuse to finally get rid of it last fall. After our first colder fall day I started thinking about getting our furnace ready for the winter. I pulled up a grate to see how clean our ducts were, they were a complete terror! Each one had at least a couple inches of dust, dirt and grime. Just the thought of all that filth blowing around was enough to make me shudder. Since moving in we had wanted to do an addition, and heat it all with radiant heat. I figured this was the perfect time to switch out systems, and save us from having to turn on our old heater. Half of our house had decent access to the floor from underneath, which presumably would make installing radiant easy on that section. Unfortunately we couldn’t access the front half of our house from underneath, so we would have to lay the tubing on top of the floor. More details on that later.
The first step…

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If you’ve been following the story of our house, I’ve related up until we actually took ownership. In may of 2005 we started moving our stuff in. As first time home owners were were quite ecstatic to finally have a place of our own. When we bought the house it had a 4 foot chain link fence in the front yard. The first thing we did was rip it out to open up our yard a little. We recycled it by using it in our back yard so that our dog would have a place to run around while we were at work. The previous owner had been parking in the back yard for years and there was even old asphalt that went through most of our back yard. It took me months to rip it out with a pick axe and a shovel. Needless to say, the back yard was a mess, and still is. Inside was a different story…

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I mentioned last week how hard it was to find an affordable home to buy. We feel very lucky to have found ours. I was practically addicted to the MLS for a couple months, looking for anything that had some potential. We had narrowed it down to two general areas that we wanted to live, downtown, or Sugarhouse. Sugarhouse is a neighborhood about 10 minutes from downtown that has a hip and unique little shopping district and lots of trendy little tutor homes. Its not exactly the place to find a good deal on a home, but it is a great place to live. We ended up getting a home in what I call Sugarhood, which is just west a couple blocks of the nice Sugarhouse area. Its a transitional area that has a lot of potential. Our home was a total steal at $106,000. It was on the market for some time in the $120 range but not selling, so the owner changed it to for sale by owner and dropped the price. Of course there is a reason it was not selling (there always is). Our house is just under 700 square feet, small even by Sugarhouse standards, and situated on a 30′ wide lot that leaves both neighbors houses less than about 5′ from our side windows. The lot is a decent size however, around .11 acres with alley access to the back yard. Now that we knew we wanted it, we had to face our first obstacle, financing.

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This is the first in a long series of posts that I will be doing over the next couple of months. One of the biggest obstacles to us aspiring modernists is finding an affordable modern home. In fact, it has become a huge niche market with tons of people trying to cash in on. Prefab housing was one of the first genuine attempts to make affordable modern homes available to the masses, but unfortunately it has come up short in filling the needs of the common man. I hope to show that with a little creative thinking, and a lot of hard work, anyone can have an affordable modern home. For those that are interested in a somewhat lengthy, but thorough discussion of how we are making it happen, read on…

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I apologize to everyone for the lack of posts lately. I am in the middle of ripping up the floors in our house to install radiant heat before winter comes. So far it has been a huge project, it turns out that the original floor was all uneven, and the previous owner had tried to fix it, but didn’t do the best job. So I will be ripping out all the floor, right down to the old floor joists, releveling it, adding the radiant, and hopefully getting it all back up and going before it gets too cold. I will give a blow by blow with pictures, and how I made it as affordable as possible when it is all over. Until then, bear with me, while the posting slows down a little.