My Thighs are On Fire

...and unfortunately, no, it's not from that. Get your mind out of the gutter.
It was from squatting up and down, up and down, all day yesterday and no, not from a specialized Pilates class at Equinox either. We were laying down these pink tube things-

that will provide radiant heating for the floor of the house. The cement guy is due to come Tuesday to pour the floor which means, holy shit, we're about to build! BUT- that also meant that we had to put those tubes in the ground yesterday which was beyond difficult and torturous. It was also a giant clusterfuck as you can see from this photo-

taken just moments before Tim, his mom, my dad, and his dad got that thing so knotted up we had to cut it. Which caused to Tim to have a conniption fit because it was already cut for the floor in specific lengths and that would screw up everything. And then it poured, soaking us to the bone as we were trying to finish. But I'd like to describe the actual process for my own edification and perhaps also for posterity.

Okay, so we unwound this giant roll. Then we laid the tubing out in three long coiled rows at 8" all the way around the perimeter of the building, then gradually expanded the rows so they were 12" apart. And every few inches, we had to bind the coil to the mesh wiring laid over the thermal sheets. This specifically means that Tim and I (being the youngest and most limber) were crouched down on our knees tying these things down every foot or so. To give you a better sense, we ran through thousands of ties. Thousands. And then my dad (shown here in some killer shades) followed behind us and clipped the extra plastic on the end of each tie.

Final result:

Meanwhile, Tim's dad held the tubing so that it would lay flat. I honestly worry some times that we might be killing our 60+ year old parents with all this hard labor but that is a whole other blog that I'll get to one of these days...

Back to the tubing. So while the process wasn't particularly terrible in short spurts, it was terrible when done in the blazing hot and humid sun for 6 hours at a time. An additional factor of pain were the thermal sheets that we were standing on. They are designed to capture sunlight and radiate heat. Let me tell you first hand, they work. And they work well. So basically we were being cooked alive while squatting up and down and blowing out our knees and cramping our backs all day yesterday. Thank God for the insane thunderstorm that finally shut us down. We worked through most of it until I was like, okay, I'm now getting frostbite from being soaking wet. Lots of extremes out there, lots of extremes...I honestly can't believe my friends don't want to come down and help out! It is such a wonderful and empowering way to spend one's weekends.

and then I worked so late that I had to stay down there and woke up at 5am today in order to beat the rush hour traffice (I didn't) to get to work on time (I didn't)/

I can't wait until Tim and I are old and have grand kids and are like "kids, your grandpa and I built this house from scratch. Hell, I even fastened the heating tubes into the very floor you are standing on." And if my grandkids are anything like me, they'll be like "that's awesome, Grandma, but you've told us that story like seven hundred times. Can I get some money?" Come to think of it, I really hope my grandkids are nothing like me.

The storm brewing: