Tiles are set

I finally finished setting the tiles. It was not my favorite part of the project so far. First, I prepared the mortar by pouring the MegaBond liquid into a 5 gallon bucket, followed by the 50 lbs of mortar mix I needed. One problem, yep that is exactly 5 gallons. There was no way to stir without spilling, as I quickly proved. So I asked the wife to run down to the basement and get one of our storage tubs and I poured in the mixture. Disaster averted, we're replacing the carpet anyway.

Then it was time to start lifting the tiles and putting the mortar down. I started in the back corner of the kitchen and lifted a tile that I made three cuts on the fit around the pantry door frame. Do you know what that piece sounds like when it tips over??

It's a large porcelain crack, followed by a string of mumbled expletives. Yeah I was ticked. Fortunately I had one extra piece of tile sitting on the porch that I could quickly cut and replace the broken tile.

After that, it was just a lot of crawling around and trying to refit the tiles into the spaces I had originally laid out. My knees are killing me, but I'm glad the hard part is done. Tomorrow I'll fill in the grout and move all the appliances back into the kitchen Friday morning.

The tiles are cut!

I'm finally done cutting all the tiles and fitting them in place. Next step - mixing up the mortar and setting them down.

My knees hurt just thinking about it.

Crouching Tiler, Shrinking Pattern

Laying out the tiles, we (ok really it was the wife) noticed that the rectangle of fancy listello


was going to be much larger than we I had anticipated. It would have been partially covered by the refrigerator and too close to the cabinets around the outside. So I pulled back some of the tile and have now decreased the dimensions of the inner pattern. I think in the long run this will be a good thing and require less overall cuts with the tile saw. We'll see.

First trip back to Lowes

Well, it was inevitable. I realized this morning that Canyon Slate and Canyon Beige are not the same colors - guess that's why they put that on the outside of the box. I was a bit concerned because they don't do a traditional exchange. You have to return the item, get a credit on your account, and then repurchase the item you want. I was afraid that they wouldn't honor the sales price and I'd be out about $20. But I simply explained the situation and they worked their magic with the computer and made it look as if nothing ever changed. Thank you Lowes for a painless process.



While I was there, I also realized that I had bought grout, but no mortar for laying the tiles down. That would have been interesting. But I bought what I needed and probably a few that I didn't and am no ready to continue on with the project.

The New Floor

Recently, I found out I was losing my job. Nice way to start a new blog huh!?!? I'll post more on that later, but skipping ahead in the story, one of the contingency plans is that we may have to sell our house. Well, as you might imagine, after 12 kid years of spilled drinks and 1.5 years of dog (does that equate to 10.5 years), the carpet is a mess and needs to be replaced. So, as you might have guessed, that means we need to replace the flooring in the kitchen.

No we didn't have carpet in the kitchen and I'm not really nuts. It actually is quite logical. see we want to replace the carpet with hardwood floors. Well, the kitchen has a very nice laminate hardwood, that has held up extremely well, but we thought it would look dumb to have real hardwood next to laminate. So it had to go.


So, first thing to do was to go the the new LOWES hardware and check out our flooring options. Now, before anyone blasts me for supporting the big box store, I did try and visit some local flooring dealers. Problem was they were never open. If you own a store, you might want to try staying open after 5pm so that people who work can come and shop. Why you cater to those who don't work and close before those of us with a paycheck can come in - I don't get it.

After exploring all our options, we decided that tile in the kitchen would work well and we found this pattern here.It looked really cool and I can handle the pattern - right?

Next, I actually took the time to sketch it all out and then graphically make sure I wasn't missing anything using Google SketchUp, a cool free program. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to make the software do what I wanted, but eventually I was able to draw the living room, dining room, hallway, and kitchen with the tile pattern. The made it really easy to count up how many tiles I would need. Please don't tell Mrs. Baxter I didn't use my algebra, cause I'm pretty sure this was one of those examples she would give whenever anyone asked "when am I ever going to need to use algebra"!

Then, as luck would have it, Lowes was having their grand opening sale and it was 10% of your entire purchase. Yeah! And, if you opened a Lowes Credit account, 0% interest for 12 months - double Yeaah! And, if you screw up and open the wrong kind of account, you can opena second account and get twice as much credit - YIKES! Somehow I ended up with $17,000 credit limit for a $2000 floor.

Anyway, I was able to get everything I needed (at least for the first trip), and the Escape was able to haul it all. I'm sure it looked ridiculous with the back end dragging from all the weight in the back.

Now, the time has come to start the project. Last night I started by getting the refridgerator and stove out of the kitchen (they look mighty nice sitting inthe dining room) and start pulling up the floor.

The lock and fold laminate came up with ease and it probably took less than half an hour to have the kitchen floor bare. If only it had gone down that easy.

After a quick sweep, the kitchen was ready for the new tile. But first, I had to find the center of the room. For this, I got out my laser level and placed it in the corner of the room and pointed it to the opposite corner. I traced the line with a sharpie and then repeated with the other corner.

I guess the line is hard to see on the blog, but if you click the photo to see a larger version and it will be there. I then droped the first 13" tile in the center and started working out from there. Once I had the pattern started and the spacers in place, I decided that was enough for the day and decided to got to bed. All in all a good start to the day.