Homes for a £ – Scene 9 Warming to the idea

Since Building Control signed the house off back in June i’ve taken my foot off the gas and have been enjoying the upstairs of my house that is complete and completely lovely to be in. The bottom half of the house needs flooring before its habitable however the underfloor heating (UFH) needs to go down before that and because I haven’t had the money for UFH, the downstairs has stalled. The below pictures showing the downstairs chipboard flooring covering.

After Liverpool City Council issued a press release that i’d been signed off, I was getting a lot of media coverage. I was able to drive a lot of traffic to my Instagram Account and built up 9k followers. For certain businesses this is enough to consider me influential and offer discounted products in return for exposure of said products through my account. Since this is the world we find ourselves in, I approach Wunda UFH and they agree to a 50% discount with some conditions.

I was thrilled and began in earnest to prep. I soon realised that despite the discount from Wunda, the installation of a wet UFH system was still going to set me back around £1000, plus the plumber and electrician and then the mammoth task of prepping and installing the whole downstairs alone. If my grey hairs have taught me anything from this house renovation its to tackle one small job at a time. Installing a wet underfloor heating system cannot be broken down into small parts, once the pipes are in, you need a plumber and electrician on standby and then you need to cover up with flooring immediately to protect the pipes. This was starting to stress me out as I knew the job required meticulous execution if it was going to work, and I’m not very meticulous so it was back to the drawing board for me.

The bathroom was bringing me a lot of joy of late as the autumn cold set in it is the only room downstairs that is finished and warm. I had my tiler, back in February, install a small 2 meter roll of electric underfloor heating from Fastwarm. I was now putting it to the test to see if it could be a space heater. With the door closed it was not only heating the floor but heating the space too. The 60mm insulated walls were paying me back here.

The more research I did the more I grew in confidence. I decided to focus on the small back bedroom first and went ahead and bought a 12m roll of the electric underfloor heating kit, tile backer boards and 9 bags of self levelling compound. I always loved the idea of a concrete floor finish so I bought the top of the range SLC and decided that was going to be my finish flooring.

All the materials came in at around £500 and more importantly it looked doable alone. I booked two weeks off work and set about prepping myself and the room for the job.