Anyone have natural stone floors?

Couldn't you install the heating coils underneath the stone like people do with tile or is the stone so heavy that it wouldn't work? Just curious as I too and looking at flooring, but think I am going to go with wood flooring down the hall, in bedrooms, office and game room. tile in bathroom and kitchen with the heating coils underneath it and do stone only in high traffic areas such as the hallway to the barn and the front entrance.

A builder told me to watch slate and water - said slate gets really slippery when wet and has caused people to fall? Has anyone experienced that as I had thought about slate for my bathroom..but not if I may get a nasty slip out of the deal...

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Like you I am building to make something that will last for hundreds of years. I've restored several wood frame houses and that work has convinced me wood is not the material to use for most of the structure even though one of the houses is over 200 years old. Wood eventually rots and the traditional houses require a lot of upkeep.

As to dishes breaking on hard floors: It takes about 1/10th of a second for something to fall from counter height. That gives you three chances to grab it before it hits the floor. If you can't be bothered then was it really that valuable?

Seriously though, I try not to be emotionally attached to the china. My mother keeps trying to give me heirloom china and other fancy things and I explain we don't live a life where antiques or fancy china belong - this is a farmstead.

I have made almost all of our own ceramic dishes and yes they do break. My son broke one the other night that I have had for over 20 years. Sad but not the end of the world. I'll setup a kiln again one of these days and make more. He felt horrible but he was trying to be careful. Sometimes things just slip. By the way, that was on a wooden floor.

On the rubber tiles, we have friends who put that in their kitchen. Looks great. I am a bit concerned with volatile out-gassing so if I were doing that I would let the tile age unstacked outdoors for a year. I don't want my family breathing toxins. That is one reason for avoiding plywood and other laminates.

In the new house we are working on I'm doing the floors in stages in order to be able to learn and experiment as I go.

Stage 1 is a slab on foam on grade. This is the structure and the thermal mass.

Stage 2 in the tiny cottage we're soon moving into is to pour a thin self-leveling floor that gives us a smooth surface over the rough slab.

Stage 3 will be to experiment with radiant heat in the floor, tile, natural stone, stained concrete, sprung concrete, etc. Different rooms will get different ways.

I want hard floors so they'll last. We do live on a farmstead so dirt comes in. It is the way of life. I've allowed head room for this build up process. Practicing in the tiny cottage will give me more experience and ideas for the long term expansion to the full house. I tend to do things in incremental practice steps, small projects at first so I can learn. The house before this one was a pig hut.

Cheers,

-Walter
in Vermont

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Highlands.... if I had access to all of those dump truck loads of "leaves", I'd probaby have even more stone in my home plans... guess it helps living in granite country! (visit your home building site often) I've got some sedimentary rock, a poor sandstone, but it's found only in small pockets, and 90% weathers into boulder shapes, instead of nice levellish building type stones.

And I like that term 'head room'... will have to remember it... I usually build with lots of head room, after some early misadventures where I tried to be really tight...

heating coils... if I lived up north where heat was needed, I'd probably think about engineering in some... hereabouts, cooling is the issue, and if the stone floor is cool in the summer, all the better. Now do they make coils, for cooling? Pump cool water from 30' deep in the lake, through the coils in the floor, to help cool the house...???...

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

sidepasser - Yes, you can put heat under natural stone. Just be sure to acclimate the stone and I strongly advise charging up the system before putting the tile down to make sure it works and it doesn't shock the tile. HOWEVER, if you have a way to install the heat under the subfloor (such as in a crawlspace as we have done) go that route. MUCH easier to install & maintain and monitor.

texican - yes, you can put in cool water (or cooled coolant) in an in-floor radiant floor system. Best to use a closed loop unless you can get environmental permissions and have a VERY good filter system though. Simplest way is to plumb with the PEX for in-floor heat and just charge it up with a refrigerant system. I like using water over coolant though - much safer & less troublesome. But unless you have super high heat from direct sunlight making the floor too hot to walk on, you won't really need a cooling system under a stone floor. The specific heat rating on most stone will distribute heat away from your foot fairly quickly so it will always feel cool unless in direct sunlight. I imagine that if you were using the floor to cool the room you'd have to have it uncomfortably cold with stone. Wood would be a different story... but then again you could always put rugs down. I just don't understand why people put down ornate hard floors and then cover them up with rugs.

You may be in Texas but a stone floor in a damp winter Texas winter will chill you to the bone. My DS has stone floors - she went from wood, to tile, to stone.... in the same house (I will make no other comment on how often she changes her home! ) Yes - put in the floor coils - you will never have to heat your home if the winter is mild and you will want to run around in bare feet. I will be worth every penny in your "new castle". Plus you can buy the kits and do them yourself.

Interesting thought would be to put in coils in the floor and then plumb them to a radiant lunar panel up on the roof pointed to the dark sky (north around here). Any warmth from the floor would thermosiphon up the tubes to the panel and radiate away to the night sky cooling the floor. Hmm...

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Pasotami... did I mention I have unlimited free natural gas? If I didn't, I would seriously look into spending a couple thousand minimum for the coils.

In a similar situation, would you go with free, or the cash outlay, for the coil heating solution, which requires electricity to work. Haven't got anything written in stone (pardon the pun) at this moment... but my budget is what most people pay just for architects and permits... Mostly a sweat equity/labor of love project...

And with global warming, I'm trying to store up all of these precious memories of cold floors... If it weren't for my house dog, I'd rarely have any kind of heat on (sad/ironic whatever, that I can use all the gas I want to heat the house up, but I don't really care for a warm home?)...but my weener dog gets to shivering pretty easy, so I leave the woodstove on when it gets coolish...

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming