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...
We knew we had to rip out all the carpet. It was a quick job that went easy enough, but uncovered some peculiar findings. Under the carpet we could tell that there were several layers of subfloor. I wasn't quite sure why, but I hoped to be able to take it down to the original subfloor, and save myself a couple inches of floor height. It seemed like for each layer of subfloor I ripped out, I found another . . . at least in some places. As I peeled the layers back it quickly became apparent why there were so many. The original subfloor, which was a very abused tongue and groove pine, was extremely uneven. The two farthest corners in the room were almost a full 3 inches lower than the high spot in the middle. After all that destruction, I now had to figure out a better solution than the built up layers of patchwork plywood. My simple carpet removal prior to the radiant install had suddenly turned into a big project.
As a quick note,I realize that this is about projects in the past. Things are starting to happen quickly in my house now, so I plan on getting caught up, and then giving weekly in depth updates as to what we are up too.