Water closet wonderfulness - Part 2

The floor in our upstairs bathroom is almost tiled!

Todd and his friend Ken have been working hard on it for the last couple of days.

Take a look...

Here the guys are starting to lay things out to get an idea of how it was going to go down.  That orange mesh is the heated pad that was supposed to go under the tile so we can have warm floors when we want them. The "supposed to" part of that mesh will be explained a few pics down...

Row one of the tile going in.  They had to level it starting with this row.  It's an important row to have even otherwise all other rows would be slanted...!

Starting row two...

About 1/3 of the way at this point.  Ok, the heated part.  The guys ran into a problem with the heating wires because they aren't going under every part of the floor.  Just down the center.  There's no sense in heating tiles under the tub, for example, but heating up to the tub is a good idea.

Apparently, it requires at least 1/4 inch of Thinset to put the wires in.  There has to be a layer to stick them to the floor, then the thickness of the wire is on top, then a layer of Thinset goes over them so the tiles can lay on top.  The problem was, they had to use only about 1/8 inch of Thinset to lay the tiles.  Any more and it would squeeze through the tile lines.  This is a problem because grout has to go in those tile lines and if they're clogged with Thinset you would have to clean EVERY ONE of those lines out first!  Could you imagine??

So, their solution was to cut the heating wires from the orange mesh, draw where the wires would go on the floor, then use Todd's saw (a special electric saw that I can't remember the name of) to carve out those lines in the cement board on the floor.  The wires would then set slightly down in those lines and they would seal them down with a little Thinset.

Success!

You can see the lines for the wires at the bottom of the photo...

Except for what looks like about three sheets of tile, the floor is DONE!  Todd said they had to stop for the time being because of something to do with the threshold at the door.  He was walking out of the house, so I didn't get a good explanation yet...