Planning fools

Monday night, we did indeed lay the rest of the plywood in the attic. Then we started trying to figure out how to run the radiant tubing up there and our heads got all tangled up like the orange pex we'd wrestled with a week earlier. Only this time we can't just cut and splice to fix the problem.

I won't bore you with the details, but the puzzles involve our bedroom closet, the plywood we just got finished laying, and the fact that the attic (it turns out) is nearly as big as the first floor. You would think this would have been obvious to us but we had been deluding ourselves into thinking we could run only 2 circuits to heat the attic, whereas the downstairs took 5 circuits. The attic is more than 2/3 the size of the downstairs; you do the math. We sure can't!

The planning spilled over into Tuesday and took almost the whole evening. Expecting to do some hard physical work and then getting sidelined by diagrams and calculations instead is enough to send us over the edge. We tried to blow off steam at the end of it by putting bracing back into the bedroom ceiling where we just added those joists, but it didn't really work (although we did get the braces in). Cleaning up all the tools that were laying around in there, then sweeping up the sawdust, helped a little.

Sigh. Time for a long pep talk over dinner. We'll get some much-needed advice from the heating company and keep slogging away.

- Erika