Installing Heat into the Kitchen’s Ceiling

If this is your first time reading the updates here on West Street Story, you are probably wondering why in the world we would install heat into the ceiling of our kitchen.

A quick recap – while the ceiling was demo’d as a part of our kitchen remodel process, we figured it was the best time to install heat into the ceiling for the in-floor heat for the upstairs bathroom remodel.  Caught up?  Good!

Installing the heat into the ceiling fell primarily on DH’s shoulders.  Although I helped fish the pex tubing downstairs and along the ceiling, and helped snip apart the metal sheets, there really wasn’t much else I could do except snap a few pictures.

{ DH beginning the install }

{ “What is that NEW board doing in the ceiling”, you ask?  We added support as we plan to add a bathtub upstairs…this also shows the pex tubing coming from the basement, up the wall, and into the ceiling }

The first step was to screw in the base layer of metal for what DH called the “sandwich” for the heating system.

And I guess I did have a small {creative} hand in this part of the process:

We did realize that we weren’t going to have to cover as much of the kitchen ceiling as we originally thought {once we mentally “designed” the bathroom layout upstairs, there wasn’t too much floor left to heat}.  So that was a nice surprise.

After we got the few sheets of the metal up, DH and I ran the appropriate amount of pex tubing that would weave up and down the floor {carrying warm, soothing water that would eventually warm our toes after a shower or while brushing our teeth}.

Then, the magic “sandwiching” came into play.  I have decided, though, that it ended up being more like burrito INSIDE a sandwich……{which sounds amazingly awesome right now as it is about lunch time}.

{ the burrito, nice and snug, ready to be sandwiched }

DH “burrito-ed” the pex tubing within a piece of sheet metal which was then screwed into the top layer of the sandwich.

The reason we took this approach {using sheets of metal}, instead of using the guides they actually sell for this type of heat installation, is that DH felt there would be more contact with the metal and the pex tubing……which meant greater dispersion of the heat!  Plus, this was MUCH cheaper.  A win-win situation.

After the burrito of pex tubing and sheet metal were installed, the final layer of the sandwich {in this case, a layer of insulation} went into place.  This insulation looked like metallic bubble wrap – had DH not use this as insulation, I may have thought to use this in my invitation packaging because of the fun surprise that would give my clients!

{ all done! }

Once everything was hooked up into the ceiling, DH headed downstairs to do some soldering and got all of the connections made to have water flowing.  And by-golly, we have water running through our kitchen ceiling {do not worry, I made sure it was THOROUGHLY tested before we started the ceiling installation}.

So, let’s recap the ceiling process thus far:

{ before }

{ demo }

{ current status of ceiling }

{ okay, actually I am lying to you…..this is not the current status of the ceiling.  the new bead board ceiling was installed this past weekend…I will post an update of that process soon! }

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