Radiator and floorboards
I’ve not been well…
I had a bout of flu and it’s meant absolutely no work on my money pit for the past three weeks.
Now I know that a lot of you out there will be murmuring “man flu” and the like, but no it was proper good nasty evil flu, I spent a week in bed and the next week recovering from a week in bed and even now back at work I still feel a bit groggy. Actually last week I was back at work and even then I spent three days in a daze trying to concentrate on my job… without much success I may add.
Anyway this weekend I did get stuck in for a day fitting a radiator and floorboards.
Just before I took all yucky I decided to lift the floorboards in the smaller of the two bedrooms where I’d been decorating. Again I realised I’d got things a bit wrong and I really should have lifted the floorboards first before I committed to decorating in anger, still this time it was more forgivable than doing the coving after decorating, the only problem this time being the mess made in removing the skirting boards, a bit of a brush up later and that should all be ok.
The plan is to cannibalise the floorboards in the small room to replace broken floorboards in the larger of these two rooms. Over a period of time floorboards suffer, some get tired and worn out, some get chipped and some get wrenched up by over-zealous trades, eager to hunt down a wire or knit in a bit of plumbing – I must add that my trades only removed boards that had previously been demolished by other trades working on the house in the past. No floorboards were hurt in the making of my new house.
Anyway my floorboards in the big bedroom had the extra added feature of being lopsided, it turns out that the big room was once two small rooms and one room was a little lower than the other. On joining the rooms this was solved by simply putting a tiny ramp in the middle of the room made up of fresh boards a foot or so wide with an inch of drop across their span. This was then covered up rather unsuccessfully by thick carpeting and thick underlay, the room had a proper tilt to it.
So the work entailed removing the floorboards, removing the ramp, levelling the room and relaying and replacing the damaged floorboards. Once this is all done then the floors would be level they’d then be ready for some sanding and varnish and all would be lovely in the world. Soooo as the small room was to get carpet then why not remove the boards in that room – taking the opportunity to insulate under the boards (in both rooms) – then lay down some chipboard and carpet this room and use the salvaged boards to fit out the big room.
Genius… well not a bad idea… well not such a good idea when you are suffering in a freezing cold house with a nasty flu and you have to look at a room with no floorboards every day. It just makes you feel cold.
Removing the boards wasn’t easy too, I started by using pry bars, crowbars, demolition bars and claw hammers. This led to lots of cracking of timber and aching limbs.
A bit of research and I found a tool that had been recently produced just for the job of lifting boards, a Roughneck Demolition / Lifting Bar, 38” of pure power. Basically a big tough lever with two prongs on the end, you place the prongs either side of a joist, slide the prongs underneath the floorboard and lever the board up. It’s not perfect, you have to work your way back and forth, but you don’t end up on your knees and it causes a lot less damage than pry tools and demolition bars. It’s also much quicker and although not perfect, it is pretty great.
Anyway a short afternoon later and with the boards now removed and stored, I relaxed into the melancholy of three weeks of illness only to surface this last weekend to do something constructive.
Nothing is simple for me, anyone can put in a radiator but I wanted to put in a floor mounted radiator. I wanted a radiator that would allow me to draw curtains behind it, on a cold night I hate drawing curtains over a radiator, all that lovely heat just draining away out of the window and not heating the room. Stuffing a curtain down the back of a radiator is terrible form too, it looks awful and the curtains get all creased. I wanted a floorstander, lots of long curtains in my front rooms and I wanted to create oodles of unnecessary work for myself.
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Also finding a radiator wasn’t that simple, a radiator on my budget, floorstanding and contemporary with a nod to the traditional, well they were pretty hard to find. I did however track down some nice ones and being half price and knocking out enough BTU for each of the rooms I snapped the supplier’s hands off and bought three, one for the small room and two for the biggy. I would have a radiator under all three of the street facing windows, all nice and symmetrical and pretty. I did ruminate a bit too much before purchasing and missed out on my preferred colour but the ones I have are really nice and will paint up well should I find they don’t fit the room scheme.
Anyway floorstanding radiators may sound a doddle to fit but you need them to be uber-well-fitted. Stick something on the floor in a room and people have a tendency to climb on them, health and safety disappears out of the window. Someone needs to crack open the top pane of a sash to let a bee out and it’s hey ho that looks substantial enough to take my weight and then it’s not just health and safety disappearing out the window. A broken leg, lots of water damage and that’s if you’re lucky, they are pretty huge, heavy and unforgiving monoliths are big radiators.
In my designs I also needed the pipework to be accessible, especially under the radiator, no more plumbers having to saw out a complete board in order to get at a leaking pipe, I needed everything to be as convenient as possible.
Anyway the weekend started with me constructing a frame in the joists to support a hatch onto which the radiator would be attached. This was necessitated as the floorboards were tongue and groove chipboard and once in place the only way to get them up was to cut the tongue and prise them out. This hatch would mean that all one had to do was loosen a handful of screws and the radiator could be popped out attached to the supporting floor.
Once this frame was constructed I measured up a piece of chipboard sheeting and cut out a neat rectangle to support the radiator and allow access. This would fit onto the preconstructed joist frame and this would in turn support the radiator.
Once cut out I screwed down this frame and pre-lined some of the spaces between the joists with insulation and then fitted more chipboard over the insulated spaces. The section I had cut out was to be fitted to the base of the radiator so this needed to be done securely, the chipboard alone would not take the weight of the radiator. A large radiator with a few screws to hold it to chipboard is a disaster waiting to happen, basically any reasonable lateral force would make the radiator rip out the screws and tumble over. What I did to resolve this was to fit blocks of wood to the back of the chipboard and I then bolted the radiator through the chipboard and blocks with the largest bolts I could find that fitted through the bosses in the radiators. I then fitted large washers prior to tightening up the nuts and basically over-engineered everything, as is my usual accustomed status in life.
All was going well till I discovered that the chrome pipes that join the radiator to the pipwork underneath the floorboards weren’t long enough. Even though I’d bought the rad’s from the same place as these pipes, no-one had informed me that they were going to be too short (I suppose they might have assumed I’d be connecting the pipes to the wall, which was a shorter run), still that’s my fault, never assume.
Anyway a trip to Screwfix should have fixed that problem, but on a Sunday afternoon I couldn’t do that, so everything came to a shuddering halt.
I did dismantle my flowmeters though and I did spend some time familiarising myself with radiator valves too, so all wasn’t a complete loss.
Is this my life now 🙂