The radiant floor is being finished today.  In fact, the media room is the last room to have the piping installed.  The installation process is quite complicated and involves a rubber mallet as demonstrated by these action shots

Sometimes the installer got very animated

He must be getting overly excited since he is almost done.  Here is the reading room with the radiant floor all ready for hookup

Also note in the above photograph how clear the windows are.  The contractors have removed all the protective plastic now that the stucco is complete.  It makes the room a whole lot brighter and the view is amazing (I will take a better photo later)

The small alcove at the bottom of the sweeping staircase also will have heated floors, so our feet will stay warm at least until we put our foot on the first step....

The radiant flooring in all of the "wet" areas, i.e. those areas that will have plumbing in them like the bathrooms and laundry, has been installed and covered with concrete in preparation for tiling.  The master bathroom, for instance, has the radiant heat pipe laid on the floor and has been encassed in concrete.  At the doorway, we get just a peek of the pipe...

but futher in the bathroom, it just looks like a concrete floor.

The same is true in the laundry room.

An up close view at the door..

The guest bathroom also has radiant floor heating buried in concrete.

And for those of you wondering, yes, the rectangular brownish thing sitting on the right side of the floor is in fact the tile that will be used to cover the shower and floor of the guest bath. 

The tile contractor has already started the tile process in the guest shower and has gotten half way up the back wall.  A close up view shows what the tile will look like.

but he still has a ways to go to finish the shower and floor.....

Out on the back deck, we have another tile contractor cutting the tile (another action shot)

Our dental hygenist was very upset with me when she read the story of going to the tile store to pick out tile that ended with Peter trying to slit his wrists with a piece of tile.  She wasn't upset about Peter attempting to slit his wrists, but she was upset that I had not published any photos of the event nor of any of the tile we had chosen.  Well, I still do not have photos of Peter with the tile implement, but, now that the tile has arrived on site, I have taken photos of the various tile we will use in our house.

The first is the tile that will be in the guest bathroom

In the guest bathroom we will have an accent line composed of the tile and glass mosaic shown below.  The glass has a grey hue to it so it will pull the tile and paint color together in this room (I am starting to get this whole interior decorator thing!)

The master bathroom will be done in grey tile.  Although the photograph below looks like blue tile, the tile is not really blue, but grey.  This tile is the floor tile.  The wall tile will be slightly lighter.  I will try to get a photograph with a more honest color tomorrow.

In the master shower, there will be a 4 inch border around the perimeter of the shower formed with the tile shown above.  The remainder of the shower floor will be tiled with the pebble tile shown below.

The last tile choice was the tile for the laundry room and it is shown below.

Well, that was not really the last tile choice.  We also want tile in the entryway from the garage to the kitchen.  I did mention above that Peter tried to slit his wrist with a piece of tile during our trip to the tile store because, as he said, "it was so frustratingly boring and mind-numbingly tedious."  Well, that was actually the third trip that I had made to the tile store to try to pick out tile and during that visit, we were only able to chose the tile for the master bathroom before the attempted suicide.  So I got to go back for yet another trip to finalize the tile for the guest bathroom, the laundry, and the garage entry.  And as there are just too may options at the tile store, by the time I had successfully completed the guest bathroom and laundry, I was done so I just told them to put the laundry room tile in the entryway as well.  And now it is done.