Our Heated Schluter Flooring
When You start to plan a room renovation, even if it's just in dreamland, where do you start? Do you start with the fundamentals or is it all about the finishing touches?
When we started planning our bathroom renovation after living with the old bathroom for almost 2 years, we really started planning from the fundamentals up. The first thing that came to mind was the regret we had not putting heated floors in our mudroom when the Tiler offered with his Schluter system. We knew this time, after learning what the Schluter system was, it was going to be used, AND was going to be heated.
So you might now ask what am I even talking about LOL. If you've ever hired a Tiler You may have seen this product before. It is an orange mat that they attach to the subfloor with Grout Before they tile your floors. Essentially it is made up of many plastic cups allowing your tiles to have a bit of movement which in turn makes them not crack. No cracks mean your floors last year's and years longer.
For an additional price, the system can also work with electrical heat. It's a kit you buy separately that you weave in between the cups of the orange mat, And then have an electrician hook it up to a control on the wall. Living in a 104-year-old home, the drafts in the winter are real. And there is no worse feeling than having cold feet and a cold body coming out of a nice warm shower in the middle of the winter. The heated floors were definitely worth it.
Using Schluters Youtube channel as a guide, Rob and I tag teamed installing the system and tiling the floors ourselves. To say we've never tiled floor before, I think we did an excellent job. The system is super user-friendly and because it was in the bathroom it was able to be fully waterproofed. They actually even sell Systems that work in the same way for your shower walls (without the heat obviously).
When it came to the wall controls we ended up opting for the Wi-Fi enabled control. This way we are able to schedule when the heat comes on based on when our family is using the bathroom the most, Having it scheduled for after supper for the kids baths, and first thing in the morning when we're getting ready for the day. That way it also helps us save on power. But I can always manually control it from the bathroom.
It has been 2 months Of having our bathroom finished and although we do have a few things we would do differently if we were start all over again, heated flooring and using the Schluter system isnt one of them.
