Marble Heated Floor Tutorial

In case you are wondering how we went about installing a heated marble floor in our Master Bath, I thought I would share the process with you. (And for more on the rest of the bathroom renovation, check out this post.)

When it came time to tile the floor of our master bath, my husband insisted that we find a way to heat it. We feel there is NOTHING worse than stepping out of the warm shower onto a freezing cold tile floor. We love the look of tile and knew that's absolutely what we wanted in there but we didn't want to have to jump from rug to rug just to be able to stay warm.

So, we looked into heating the floor. There are several different options but we ended up choosing an electric heat system. It was the simplest of the options and most economical for our application.

We purchased a Warm Tiles Cable Kit and Thermostat from Menards for around $180 to do our 5 x 7 bathroom (less than 25 sq ft of that would actually be tiled).

Here are the steps we followed:

1. Lay down backer board (as we would have done for any floor tiling project) so that you're not tiling directly to wood that can expand/contract like crazy and result in cracking grout and tiles within a small window of time. Believe us, this advice comes from experience!

2. Lay out heated floor cables per spacing instructions on the Cable Kit packaging. You can see that we would have 4 rows at 1" spacing following by a 3" gap then another 4 rows, etc. We were careful to lay cables no closer than 2" to any fixtures such as the toilet, sink, tub or walls. (You can also purchase already laid out Warm Tiles mats that take care of the spacing for you, but I believe the cable kit is a bit cheaper.)

3. Install wiring connecting the floor cables to a thermostat on the wall. You can even purchase a fancy schmancy programmable thermostat that will turn on, say at 5 a.m. so the tiles are nice and warm for you when you wake up in the morning. We did not do this. And we ended up running our Warm Tiles system 24/7 last winter. It really did not raise our electric bill by that much.

4. Bury the cables in self leveling cement. Admittedly, this was probably the most nerve wracking of the steps since we'd already had carpet laid in the adjoining master bedroom and walk in closet and I was concerned the cement would get in our carpet! We used painters tape and scrap lumber to contain it, in our case.

5. Lay tiles on top of the dried/cured self leveling cement using tile mortar. Then grout and seal away as normal, per instructions on packages. We installed marble tiles (that we found on clearance at Lowe's for $1 / sq ft I believe). Gotta love a clearanced item!

As a side note, before we officially mortared our tiles down, since they are a natural stone that varies quite a bit and our clearanced tiles had a lot of chipped corners, etc. we took hours and hours to lay them out ahead of time and decide exactly which tile we would place where. We even numbered them on the back with a carpenter's pencil: 1 thru 30 or something like that and also placed numbers on a sketched out grid on the cement so we could take the tiles outside, cut them to fit their location on the tile saw and then know exactly where they went when we came back in. It really helped us out.

We used 1/8" tile spacers on our floor.

Here's Dave mixing up the tile mortar in a bucket. You can buy already mixed up mortar but it is more expensive and actually has an expiration date.

About 3/4 of the way done! I was driving David nuts throughout this project. He finished it just a week or so before Levi was born so I was pretty antsy to get done.

Even though we used the spacers we realized the tiles were not always perfectly square, nor were the walls. We live in a fallen world! So Dave would sight down the grout lines to make sure they were staying straight and when they looked perfect he would use painters tape to also hold the tiles in position overnight till the mortar dried. There are probably not a lot of people that would be as picky as us, but what can I say? We're detail oriented people around here.

A few days later we were ready to grout the tile. Woohoo!

We also tiled above our shower and bullnosed 3 x 12 cut down tiles for a frame around the shower and a baseboard. Like this:

All in all, heating our bathroom floor was a relatively small expense in the whole scheme of things, especially considering it was not all that much space to begin with, and the heating along with the marble tile just makes our master bath seem so much more luxurious! There is not a day in the winter that goes by that I'm not thankful for it. I even turned it on this morning on the chilliest morning around here since May.

I'm linking this up to Homemaker on a Dime's Creative Blogger Hop & Party today.

A "Cosmetic" update that turned into more...

When I was about 3 months pregnant for Levi, we decided to tackle our Master Bedroom/ Bath. We wanted this space to be finished before the baby was born so we thought we'd play it safe and begin it 6 months ahead of time. After all, we only planned to do a little cosmetic update to this bathroom. We had ended up gutting and redoing the entire hall bath to the tune of about $2,500 and we did not want to spend that much on this bath. We wanted to keep it as cheap as possible.

We planned to replace the shower with the same type of set up that was in there. We would have just kept the existing one but our water heater had been corroding for a few years and dumping a ton of iron into our water resulting in anything that was subjected to hot water to take on an orange cast.

It was nothing to really get excited about but it worked and, like I said, I didn't want to spend much.

We also planned to paint / refinish our sink base, medicine cabinet. And put in new flooring.

But our friends Nick, Seth and Justin came over to help Dave one Friday night. And that's when we unearthed the nightmare....After they pulled up the bathroom linoleum we found this water damage.

The shower had been leaking. When we got into the crawlspace we saw why. When we had the home inspected before buying it, the inspector stated that the shower drain was leaking. We asked the previous owners to fix that before we bought it. They said they did. Apparently all they did was spray a GIANT puff of "Great Stuff Expanding Foam" all around the drain. Being naive 20 year olds who had no idea how to repair plumbing, we didn't even think to check their work. So 7 whole years later, there was some damage. The leaking drain had caused a bit of water damage on the surrounding floor joists and subfloor and had wicked up the walls and damaged the studs and drywall. We determined we would have to gut this entire area and start from scratch to be sure that we were eradicating all the water damage. So we tore out the walls and subfloor, sister up the damaged floor joists with new joists and then put in a new subfloor and walls.

So much for the budget friendly cosmetic upgrade!

Look at this bad boy surrounded by expanding foam.

And the wet floor joists.

In the photo below you can see the doubled up floor joists:

After a day of demolition, here's half of our house in a trailer in the driveway!

Since we basically had to rebuild this entire section of the house anyways, I set to work on determining a better layout for this area...

Here are some floorplans for you to see what I will attempt to describe.

We never liked how the bathroom was basically a hallway between the laundry room and master bedroom. Who likes bathrooms with more than 1 door anyways? Especially when they don't lock? It's always a bit nerve wracking to try to go to the bathroom in that scenario. So, we decided to close off the doorway to the laundry room and make this bath strictly a "master bath" off the "master bedroom" creating a lot more privacy.

We would eliminate the closet in the laundry room (on the right side) and use that space to make a larger Walk In Closet off the Master Bath. We considering creating access to the WIC from the bedroom but liked the idea of more wall space in the bedroom for furniture, etc.

We would then build a closet on the other end of the laundry room to enclose the water softener and put the plumbing that was coming out of the floor (the big black blob in the top left corner of the Before drawing) back inside the walls. This would also give us a place to tuck our coats, purses, etc.

We also wanted to determine a way to have a larger shower, possibly a shower/tub combination in this bathroom. We determined that a standard unit would be 60" long. And our bathroom was only 58" long. So we moved the wall between the bath and laundry room 1" into the laundry room (2" would have ran into the exterior doorway) and then framed the wall with 2 x 3's instead of 2 x 4's to get our extra 2" so we could fit a tub in.

This is what we ended up with in the bathroom after about 6 LOOOONG months of work (and I have no idea how much money....I stopped counting!):

It was finished about 1 week before the little guy in the picture above was born.

And please check back tomorrow morning for a step-by-step tutorial on how we heated our marble tile floor.

Kitchen Post #6 - Electrical & Lighting

I believe in one of my previous kitchen posts I mentioned that we had to relocate our breaker box from the kitchen wall to our laundry room. It can be seen here, to the left of the stove/dishwasher-on-wheels:

 Originally, we had planned to just place an 18" wide wall cabinet with the back cut out in front of it and be done with it. We could just open the cabinet door and reach in to access the wiring. But in talking to our friend, a home inspector, he recommended that we really consider relocating it. He was concerned that when we went to sell our home, depending on the inspector, we might be required to relocate it then anyways, as you really shouldn't have a cabinet in front of the panel, at least in Indiana. So, we spoke with an electrician and he quoted us something like $3,000 to do that. Um. No thank you. That would have seriously blown our budget. Considering we had like NO budget for electrical relocations. So.....luckily I have a creative husband who ended up bartering with the electrician. It pays to have skills, folks, even if they're not the ones you really need at the time. You can always barter! So Dave worked on Kirby's truck in exchange for Kirby to redo our wiring. And our friend Jack, who works for the electric company, saw to it that our line was buried from the road to the house and our service was upgraded. Woohoo! Another serendipity of that is that while they were upgrading the service they found that the main electrical line coming into the house was, well, scorched. Or something bad like that. Basically it could have burnt our home down at any time. So, God was defnitely watching over us! Hours and hours later, and one week exactly before our baby was born (can you say, "impatient pregnant woman"?) we had newly buried 200 amp service and a brand new breaker box in our laundry room with extra space for more breakers in it! And all new wiring in our kitchen. That was a huge blessing considering we were never able to run the dishwasher, light and microwave at the same time in our previous kitchen. And we went from 2 working outlets to 21 in the new kitchen!!! I love that. Never before could I run more than 1 appliance at a time since our stove took up on of the outlets. I had to mash potatoes in the laundry room on more than 1 occasion!

Now onto the kitchen lighting...our kitchen originally had a ceiling fan and 1 fluorescent under cabinet light. See the before/in progress photos (above and below)....

Our ever-so-unofficial "lighting plan" involved installing some can lights above the sink/dishwasher and replacing the ceiling fan in the center of the room with another one that was lower profile and prettier. However, once we installed our new cabinets, not only did we realize that the fan was off-center in the room, but we also saw that it was just too low for a light and not nearly bright enough. We even purchased a low profile ceiling fan and held it up there but it was just too low to light the room very well. And we love light in this household. 

And it blocked the view of the gorgeous new cabinets (and we could only imagine how it would block the view of the crown molding once it was installed). So we decided to give up on having a ceiling fan in the kitchen and just install a ceiling light. While we were at it, we centered it in the room. That involved Dave cutting a new hole in the ceiling and actually using the round piece of drywall that he cut out for the new hole to patch the old hole. But you can't tell now after a bunch of mudding and "re-texturing"...{FYI, you can buy textured paint at Lowe's to fix small areas like this!}

When that was said and done, we still found it much too dark for our taste just having a light in the center of the room. So we decided to add 3 can lights above the area where our stove would go. We knew that would provide a lot of needed light in that dark corner. So I covered up all the cabinets with plastic and towels so our dishes would not be covered with dust when Dave crawled up in the attic to cut the holes and install the cans. This is what we ended up with.

*And note that the reason there's no light in the middle of the room in the above photo is that poor Dave broke the globe on our new light as he was taking it out of the box. So we had to order a new one. $60 and 2 weeks later, we installed the new one. Hhhh...the realities of renovating...

I love the can lights. They really showcase our cabinets nowadays.

We also installed 3 pendant lights over the bar counter (you can kind of see them in the background above).

So that's it for our little Kitchen Electrical / Lighting story. Have you ever changed your plan once you saw stuff in real life like we did?