Slash6.org

It's been over a month since the last update. I've been too busy to keep on top of everything. The concrete floor is in place, the piping for the heated floors is holding pressure.


Everything looks good as far as the cement floor goes.


We made some progress on the heat pump installation. The indoor unit is a Bosch instead of an IVT. Under the skin the Bosch has IVT guts so the only difference is the label on the outside. I don't care what it says on it, as long as it works.


Britt and Stig gave us a hand and let us use their car to tow a few loads of stuff to the recycling center in Sjobö. 4 loads later and you could see the floor in the garage for the first time since June. Once the flooring in the house is done we will empty the garage, repaint it and put epoxy paint on the floor so I can move my project car here and later my motorcycle.


The building inspector recommended we put gravel around the house, especially the uphill side, to prevent moisture from coming in. Gravel is a weird thing. If you buy it from the local "big box" hardware store it is rather expensive and you need a pretty heavy duty trailer to haul it. If you buy it from a quarry its cheaper but the delivery costs more than the gravel. I decided, since we were going to put gravel around the whole house anyway, to order 8 metric tons of gravel and not mess about trying to haul it or buy it a little at a time. Now I have an 8 ton pile of gravel in my front yard and lots of work to do.


The heat pump needs a level surface to sit on. The options were to bury Leca blocks for it to sit on or pour a pad in concrete. We decided to go the concrete route thinking I would borrow a cement mixer from my neighbors at work. The problem is the mixer would not fit in my Fiat. Some people played up mixing the concrete by hand as being too difficult. It's not. We mixed thirteen 25kg bags of cement in a wheelbarrow and poured the form ourselves. Linda was in charge of water and pouring the mixed cement in place, I mixed. I suppose if you had 20+ bags of cement to mix it would pay off to get a mixer, otherwise renting or borrowing a mixer is more work than mixing the stuff yourself.


When mowing the lawn at the house we found a penis shaped mushroom growing near the garage.

So, 4 weeks of drying out the floor and we got a bit extra done. One major issue right now is that 2 windows cannot be closed due to the sill change. The walls have settled a bit and one living room window and one of the large bedroom windows refuse to close all the way. We contacted the guy that did the flooring as he said he would fix them before they finished. First he told us he would fix them when he came to pick up the leftover concrete. Then he said he would drop by when he dropped off the key and fix them. He mailed us the key but never fixed the windows. He promised us to come on the weekend, he promised us to come by during the week, he promised to call before he drove over. In the end he left a card in our door after not calling and not turning up on the day he promised to. He did a good job on the floor work, he's just not so good on details... or turning up when he says he will.

We finally got around to ordering tile for the kitchen and hallway. We looked all over for something we liked and found it at Kerma. Unfortunately it was from Villeroy & Boch and thus painfully expensive. Kerma did have some good suggestions as to pricing for the installation and who to contact. After all the work tearing out the floor and all the other small projects, we figured we would leave the tile to someone who's done it before. After calling around and meeting with a few tile installers we noticed a pattern among contractors in general. Some of the people we talked to would go on and on about how busy they were, give conflicting information, and then give an offer that was far too expensive. One home building site on the net, byggahus.se, recommended at least 3 quotes from contractors before you decide on one. That is sound advice, you won't get a feel for the right contractor unless you talk to quite a few of them.

More annoying than primadonna contractors are plumbing and heatings supply places and Golvpoolen. Two plumbing supply places I talked to refused to answer a question of mine about a connector for some pipe I purchased. One directed me to the Plumbers Union website, the other was "too busy dealing with large customers to answer such a question". I would have at least expected to be redirected to the manufacturer if that was the case, at best get the name of someone to contact. I could even understand, to some extent, that mundane questions take a backseat to serious inquiries revolving around high budget projects. In this case, one supplier had referenced an additional piece needed for this particular connector which did not exist under the same name in their catalog. They sell the pipe, the connector kit, but the additional piece was a mystery that they refused to solve. The other place had the connector kit but very little information on the additional required parts. The manufacturer's documentation had all the parts but used different names for some of them and didn't list the RSK numbers (standardized part numbers). In the end I went by what the manufacturers documentation showed and ordered from the shop that was too busy to help me only because they listed the RSK number and paying double shipping for two seperate orders would have been expensive.

And then there are the tile bastards... Golvpoolen. We went in, met a nice sales guy, picked out what we wanted, paid a downpayment and were told they had 60 m2 of tile ready for us. Just pay the rest to their bank account, have someone pick it up, end of story. So, we paid it. They called up the next morning and said they'd received payment. When I called back to let them know that my contractor was coming into the city during the day jackass that answered the phone decided to make fun of my accent to his colleagues before passing the phone over to the guy I needed to speak with. The guy I was dealing with then tells me that they don't have the tile in stock, that we have to wait until next week to get it. I called Kurt to tell him the tile would be late, Linda called this guy back again. It turns out they have 60m2 of tile but from 2 different batches so there will be a color difference. The guy we ordered from no longer works there. The downpayment we made was too small. They could get the tile to their store by monday morning but it would cost them a whole 300:- extra (on a 16000:- order) to get it there by then. We were supposed to have called ahead to let them know when we wanted to pick the tile up. So, in a nutshell, the guy that left promised us something that they couldn't deliver and they were not willing to part with 300:- to make it right. Kurt ended up getting the stuff 1 week later. So, if you ever have the displeasure of purchasing anything from one of these professional stores that sells to private people get everything in writing, make notes of who you talk to and when, and be prepared to get frustrated.


Lucky for us Kurt knows how to get stuff done. Here is the kitchen with the new tile in place.


More kitchen.


The hallway.

This weekend we are hoping to finish filling in around the pad for the heat pump with gravel, install the sensor for the heat pump system, possibly install tile for the fireplace and hopefully mow the grass one last time for the year.

Ah the joys of installing radiant heated floors...

Saturday, while Linda was at work, I headed out to the house to start work on the floor heat. I spent a bit of time getting all the bits together to make sure we had a complete kit. I pulled the livingroom shelving out of the wall as it was the perfect spot to put the manifold, right in the center of the house. The shelving turned out to be a whole Ikea wardrobe buried in the wall and then divied in half with a piece of panelling so it was half as deep. I pulled it out of the wall and when Linda and Stig arrived we dumped it outside. I got to work hanging the MDF and attaching the manifold, receiver, power supply and a power strip. Linda laid out the plastic framing that the PEX piping clicks into. We ended work on Saturday with dinner at Lynn and Kim's.

Sunday morning we made a run for last minute fittings for the manifold and some different insulation for the connecting PAL pipe. The insulation I bought turned out to be the wrong size so I needed to get something that would work in a hurry. Panic hit on the way to the house as I realized we had a massive ammount of work to complete before monday. I talked to Ingolf about postponing the cement until later but it was not possible as the workers had already been arranged. We'd have to suck it up and "git 'er done!!"


Here is the framing in the largest bedroom facing the corner bedroom.


Here is the framing in the living room before it was pinned into place.


We borrowed this tool from Anders for holding the PEX piping in a spool. It was a bit wonky at first but Stig put a bit of oil on it and it started working perfectly.


Here's the result of the livingroom. Our first room. It went better and faster than expected but the PEX pipe can have a mind of its own at times.


Each PEX pipe had to be properly cut, a connector fitted, and then attached to the manifold before a section could be laid. When the section was completed the other end was cut, connector fitted, and the completed circuit attached to the manifold. By late evening this process was getting very tedious.


The completed kitchen. We laid the last run at around 11pm. Stig stuck it out with us for the whole thing! We drove Stig back to his stuga and drove back to Malmö around 11:30pm. We had until 8:00am the next day to get the system pressure tested. Yikes!

05:00 Monday morning I got up, got dressed and took Chester with me back to the house. I started taping up all the manifold connections with thread tape Stig had loaned me. Around 6:30 Stig dropped by to check things out. First pressure test showed a ton of leaks. I took everything apart to fix it but ran out of thread tape. I made a run into Veberöd for more tape and got back just as Ingolf and his guys were turning up. A hurried reassembly and a few curse words in Swedish and English later and it was sealed and working. I purged the system and pressurized it up to 2bar before the water from the tap ran out of oomph. It was supposed to be tested with more but if the pipe in the floor wasnt leaking at 2bar, I should be more than ok. Either way I was well out of time.


Here is the manifold after installation. The down side of the location I picked was a large number of the pipes had to make a wild bend back towards the other side of the house. This made things a bit hard to pin down to the foam insulation. Luckily Ingolf's guys said they could level it out.


Here it is, the system pressurized and me able to depressurize after a long weekend.


Last look at the radiant heated floors before the workers covered them in cement!

Been too preoccupied with the house to bother updating slash6.org. Sorry, one of the two is on a schedule.


My father-in-law Sven was nice enough to take some photos of the house on the 17th of August. This is the living room after Kim Hvid and I spent an afternoon bashing the floor out. Kim and Lynn came over a couple of times and helped us get the last bits of the floor out. Lynn even climbed up on the roof to help me get the chimney out. Kim helped roll the fireplace into the garage. We're lucky they helped out, it would have been impossible to remove the chimney and fireplace without them. I almost tipped the fireplace over in my haste to get it out of the house.. d'oh!


Big piles of wood and insulation in the kitchen. Insulation is nasty stuff.. it took a while before the itch went away.


Linda swept up the living room while I finished what little bits were left to remove. We saved the hardest bits for last.


Kitchen in the final stages of cleaning. Once this stuff was out of the way, Ingolf and his crew could get to work. Ingolf told Linda and I we were the first couple he'd run across that, when given the option to do the demoliton work ourselves actually went ahead and did it. It was a hefty bit of work but I don't regret doing it.


Here are the first stages of the sill removal. Ingolf's guys work FAST.


Here is a blurry closeup of the new sills. They replaced everything. We were slightly concerned because someone on Byggahus.se's forum did not recommend Bygg96 because they claimed that they did a bad job and left large pieces of the sill in place. No cause for concern. Nothing was left behind. I made a couple of after-work runs to the house to remove a pesky bit of floor trapped under the wall that holds the stove and microwave. Svein and I made a trip out to clean up some of the electrical conduit that had been nicked or broken during the sill change.


Sills replaced, Ingolf's guys started evening out the concrete foundation in preparation for the plastic moisture barrier and foam insulation.


Living room (and the back of Britt Marie's head) with a nice even foundation.


Chester inspects the work.


The largest bedroom with an even concrete foundation.


Last monday my heated floor kit arrived from Rinkaby Rör.


Ingolf's guys worked Tuesday and Wednesday to install the plastic moisture barrier (plattonmatta) and foam insulation layer. The "radiant heated floors" or whatever they're called in english go on the foam layer.


Blurry late night photo of another section of completed insulation.

I've got what I hope is all the bits for the heated floors ready to go. This weekend is the installation, starting next week they pour the final bit of floor! We're nearing completion! Much more to go, however. The last layer of floor takes 6 weeks to dry before we can put wooden flooring in. Tile can go in almost straight away though we haven't even picked it out yet. And then there is the heatpump.. kitchen cabinets.. sink and plumbing.. painting and wallpaper..

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to m... err.. yeah.. back to work..