Day 3 of the tiling project, and it's the 4th of July, the last day of our 3-day weekend. We'd hoped to finish the tiling today, but we'd been invited to two cookouts, one at noon, and one at 2, and were supposed to cook food to take to each meal. With only a couple of hours to work, we dived in.
Last night, I'd tiled the "plumbing wall" up to the point where we'd have to cut tiles to go around the water control knob. When I went into the bathroom to resume the work, The Husband was already standing in the shower, inspecting the hole we'd cut for the control knob. He had a frustrated look on his face. "I think we've covered up one of our screw holes," he said, pointing to the plumbing. ("Screw holes." You learn techical terms like this when you become a do-it-yourselfer.) We got the flashlight and looked, and, sure enough, we'd goofed. The brass plate that covers up the ugly plumbing business has two holes in it where two screws should go to hold it in place. Behind the wall was a metal bracket with two holes to accomodate the screws. We could only see one of them. We'd have to make the hole bigger.
I groaned, remembering how hard it had been to cut the backer board. The hole didn't need enlarging by much, but cutting off a little bit of that stuff is harder than cutting off a lot. What in the world were we going to use to do it? We couldn't use the jigsaw or the Craftsman cutter; there were pipes nearby, and we wouldn't risk drilling into them. The job would take forever using a utility knife. Our minds raced to think of some tool in this house that might saw, or gnaw, or file a half inch off the hole. I went to the utility room to dig around in the toolbox and the cabinet, looking for a saw we once had, but couldn't find it. I went back to the bathroom. "Remember that bad-ass little hand saw we used when we cut that metal threshhold?" I asked to The Husband. Its blade was rectangular and edged with viscious teeth. "It might be too wide to fit in the hole, but...." The Husband said he thought we could replace the original blade with the jigsaw blade. He disappeared for a moment, then returned with said saw, jigsaw blade in place. It took him less than a minute to hack away enough board to uncover the hole. We were back in business. I started smearing adhesive while he went to cut some tiles to fit around the knob.
For a few minutes, we were like a well-oiled machine, pasting and cutting and slapping those tiles on the wall. In no time, we reached the point where we'd decided to insert a decorative tile border. This stuff is cool. It's a mesh strip on which small tiles have been glued in a pretty pattern. It's all tiny squares and diamonds and triangles. You just glue the strip to the wall as a unit. We'd bought an extra strip to use for parts, knowing that the odds were against being able to use only whole strips, and we'd been right. Before the border was completely in place, we'd peeled off a good number of tiles to fill in the design in the corners and at the edges. Thank goodness we'd picked up a tool to score and nip tile, for we did have to trim a few of those tiny pieces.
Above the border, we'd planned to set the tiles diagonally (a quilter would call this setting them "on point"). This meant cutting tiles in half to place along the top edge of the border and at the ceiling. But, hey, we have a wet saw, right? How hard could this be?
Well, it's hard. Kind of. First, using the wet saw can be kind of a pain. The tile wants to chip as the sawblade nears the end of a cut, and that leaves a little notch on the corner of the triangles. (We found that if we hold the tile really tight, and keep an even pressure while pushing the tile across the blade, it doesn't chip as much.) Then there's the problem of the way a diagonal messes with the mind. After hours of looking at the tiles set square, I had to learn to re-see the pattern. We had trouble remembering which side of a triangle needed shaving once we moved it to the saw. Plus, I was now working directly at eye level and could plainly see every little imperfection in angle and distance. We didn't get many of those diagonal tiles laid before it was time to make ready for the cookouts.
7:30 p.m. - Having been outside in the heat all afternoon, and having stuffed ourselves with food, the last thing either of us wanted to do was to come home and commence tiling. At 9:30, it was lights out for us. The shower can wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment