Exceedingly Mundane

Are you getting tired of all the posts and updates on our ceramic tile project yet??!! Well, settle in, because it looks like they will keep coming for a while! It’s taking longer than we projected, and the scope has expanded. Since the pipe burst in the laundry room, we will now have to replace sheetrock and repaint that room, which was not part of the original plan.

For those of you who are interested…. read on (with pictures)!

I did a quick summary last night of what all was going on. I won’t really go into a whole lot more detail, but thought you would want to hear a few tidbits of stuff that was happening, and see a few pictures too!

We made 2 or 3 trips to Home Depot and another trip to Ace Hardware to get all the piping, fittings, valves, hoses, soldering torch and other stuff needed to fix the burst pipe in the wall of the laundry room. This ended up taking up all morning, and the guys didn’t get ready to work on tile till about 1 PM. Plus, we had to stop for lunch shortly after that (I went and picked up burgers and chicken sandwiches from Trace Grill).

Here’s Terry soldering the new pipe and fittings into place in the laundry room wall:

After they finished the laundry room, they moved the washer and dryer to the garage. They then attempted to move the loaded refrigerator out to the garage also. Uh-huh, no way. This did not work. First of all, as soon as they tilted it back on the dolly, the doors to both the fridge and freezer part flew open and lots of food fell out on the floor. Then, they secured the doors closed with rope and tried again. This time we discovered that the fridge would not fit through the interior and exterior door to the garage with the doors of the refrigerator on (the handles protruded too far and wouldn’t fit through the door frame, even with our house doors removed). So, Tim made an executive decision to leave the refrigerator in the kitchen. We pushed it back into its “hole” and will tile in front of it. Then, later after that tile has set, we’ll come back and pull it forward and try to tile the area under the fridge. Always something!

Here’s the attempt to move the fridge, it was a good try guys!

After lunch, the guys got serious with their floorplan and set out to lay out tiles, mark lines, make chalk lines, and get all the lines ready to lay out the tiles. This took a while, a lot longer than we thought. So, that pushed us even further back on when we could actually start mixing the mortar and laying the tiles themselves.

Here’s a shot of them marking the lines in the kitchen:

OK, with the lines drawn, it’s time to mix the mortar and start laying tiles:

And here’s a picture of much later in the night, Terry was still here hard at it. He really worked hard all day and helped us out so much. We really appreciate him coming!

And here’s what it looks like today. Today we rest.