[Red] Snakes on a [concrete] plane; I'll have the Sam Jackson

good mother@#$%ing choice

Renovation, as in life, is a balance of "wants" and "needs". Every day we face tough choices between selfish acts and selfless action. I may have 'wanted' to continue using my crocodile mile deep into the month of October but I 'needed' to go to work last fall so difficult choices had to be made. Similar indeed to another balance of want and need we faced in the decision to heat the kitchen floor. The heat in our house continues to come via 18th century technology - hot water is boiled in a device called a "boiler" and radiates throughout the house from things called "radiators". At it's most primitive a cast iron pipe flows water to a cast iron box, it heats up and you feel warm. Radiators are effective, and boilers are efficient and quiet so we're hard pressed to remove the working system to be replaced with a forced air system. The trick has always been to find a way to live with the hulking cast iron box that provides the radiating unless of course you could find some other thing to contain the hot water to do the radiating...

Which brings us back to the awkward "snakes on a plane" Samuel Jackson references. Boilers can pipe hot water anywhere and any surface - if large or conductive enough can transmit the heat - in our case the kitchen floor provides such surface and area. We set about running loops of pex tubing on top of the newly installed/ insulated concrete floor and beneath the future tile in an effort to free ourselves from the oppression of one more cast iron box. Plus, people are happier when their feet are warm and we've spent the last 50 years trying to heat our heads with forced air systems - it makes sense, you're probably wearing socks right now (I know I am). So out with the weekend and in with the red tubing:

I imagine the pex tubing to be snakes in this reference

and the concrete floor to be the "plane"

The pex lays out like air drying pasta and eventually plugs into a separate heating zone on the boiler in the closet adjacent to the kitchen.

The boiler has been named Sam Jackson just to make things easier

ready for tile