We’ve laid every tile we can lay without standing on any of them. I’d prefer to have the job done today, but not at the expense of doing it right.
Month: July 2015
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Hell Yeah edition
Quite a lot accomplished in the last 24 hours or so.
That is the bathroom floor covered in horrid blue glue and Tavy Thin Skin, which is a product I’d never heard of a week ago designed to make it easy to tile over vinyl. I spent a fair amount of time Googling and searching around and discovered that, while I found a lot of contractor types who hadn’t used it going “Man, I don’t see how that will work well,” I couldn’t find anyone who had used it and had bad results from their floor. The biggest complaints were about spreading the glue and that was something I felt like I could deal with. We did not get to the skimcoat yesterday, but we did do it this morning:
So. Nice clean layer of thinset laid down; tomorrow we tile. That is probably going to extend into Monday but I’m hoping we can get it done in a day; it’ll depend on how easy it is to cut around the toilet and the floor register and to deal with the two rows where we basically just have to re-cut the rectangle on the tile.
A day after the tile is set, grout.
A day after the grout, the sink and the toilet (at least the toilet; I’m predicting complications with the sink) goes back in, along with the door, and we are set, son. At least until we decide what to do with the electrical. The lamps are still going to be in the wrong place, and we won’t be putting the mirror up until we decide where to put lighting. But basically everything below the waist will be finished.
Also completed today and yesterday: Cut the trim around the door so that the tile could go under it, trimmed the door itself by half an inch, then yanked a door from our other bathroom and trimmed it by half an inch. That door in particular has been a huge problem since we got the house; at some point some water got between the vinyl and the subfloor in there and bubbled the tile up, and the door’s been extremely difficult to open and close, to the point where we rarely use it.
No longer. Fixed as hell. We’ve both been just opening and closing it for the hell of it.
Also fixed: every folding closet door in the house, damn near all of which were off their tracks. I’m kicking myself for this one; turns out these are extremely easy to fix, it’s just not immediately obvious how to do it.
Important detail: not a bit of this project (and by “project,” I’m extending all the way back to the very beginning) would have been possible without the internet. We would have made so many mistakes. I love being able to look shit up and find videos on how to do stuff any time I need it.
And now I shall go to my other job, and endeavor not to fall asleep behind my counter.
Pretty
Bathroom pictures later. Backyard flowers now.
On Assholes, or, I Hate It Here
I recently became aware of a Facebook group called Michiana’s Panhandler Invasion. I became aware of it because Facebook spent a while insisting that I should join it until I figured out how to convince the site’s thinkbots otherwise.
(A quick note, for the non-locals: the area on the border between Michigan and Indiana is frequently known as Michiana.)
Anyway, I suggested in a related conversation that the group might be better renamed 1300 Assholes, possibly occasionally updating their name with the most recent appropriate number, and then banished them from my mind. I have enough evil crap to deal with in there as is and I don’t need these morons or their shit clogging my brain up.
There is an intersection not far from my house where there are frequently a couple of panhandlers. Not constantly, but maybe half the time I drive past there during daylight there will be someone at the intersection, and sometimes there are two different people on opposite corners.
I drove through this intersection on my way home from picking the boy up from day care today. There was no one at the intersection, but someone had spraypainted “PICK UP YOUR TRASH” on the curb in big green letters, along with the word “LIAR” three or four times.
I am not exaggerating or lying in the least when I say that I’d rather have the panhandler than the ambulatory sack of meat trash who decided to paint that hateful shit on the curb. Fucker probably thinks he’s a Christian, too.
I hate it here.
TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Friday
Basically took yesterday off from bathroom stuff because of the carpet/tile people coming in to clean; clearing the living room and dining room of anything we could carry counted as work enough, and I spent the day in here working on Searching for Malumba.
I will be satisfied with myself if, by the end of the day, I have:
- Cut the door trim so that the tile fits underneath it (already done!)
- Fixed the last couple of screws on the plywood piece so that they’re flush
- Measured, cut and glued down the Tavy Thin Skin over the vinyl tile and plywood
- Restored the living room and dining room to usable status
I will consider it a bonus if I have also:
- Laid down a skim coat of mortar over the Thin Skin.
No tiling is planned for today. I’m hoping to get that done this weekend, and I should be able to, especially if I get that skimcoat done.
After
Well… uh… the carpet looks *great*, but photographs do not do it justice. Like, my phone is showing phantom dirt, or maybe it’s got a little time machine attached to the lens that I didn’t know was there before, or something like that, and the carpet looks muddy and disgusting despite no longer being muddy and disgusting.
The grout in the entryway actually looks about the same, which is moderately disappointing.
Here; I dry-fit some of the floor tile in the bathroom today. Have a picture of that.
Before
Tufts of dog hair and other grossness deliberately left for comparison purposes.
Font test 2
Nobody likes the font on the last image. OK. Any of these better? And can you tell me what #4 is reminding me of?
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