Kitchen Tile

So it turns out updating a blog regularly isn't my strong suit...and we can go right ahead and add staying motivated to work on the house on all my days off to that list, too.

But, I haven't done absolutely nothing in the last month. My kitchen floor is tiled, and two weeks later it was grouted. Here's a photo journal of the process:

Before

Mi padre marking our working lines.

Laying out the tile along the working lines for good measure.


Mortar

More Mortar.

Laying the first quadrant.

Tiling ourselves out of a corner.

First quadrant complete.

Over to the stair-landing/back entry.





Almost done.

Mixed grout (the color is Mocha, it dries a lot lighter...you'll see)

Applying the grout.

Ground Zero getting finished off.

Applying the grout wasn't bad, cleaning was tedious, but not awful.

Laptop set-up to watch a movie while I scrubbed grout off into the evening.
After.

I'm happy with the finished project, a few minor imperfections to prove it was hand-crafted, but it certainly puts everything in the room on top of it to shame.

I'll leave you with a couple before and afterz:

Cabinets, Never-Ending Cabinets...

Well the to do list rages on while the progress keeps seeming to slow down. My resolve is worn but standing. I still don't have a kitchen somehow, but I do have my old high school diet of hot pockets and fast food back in full swing.

Me re-enforcing a cabinet (not pictured: My resolve)

For some reason it slipped my mind that when I took the cabinets out they were rotten and destroyed. So I've spent the lesser part of two days trying to be a cabinet-maker without becoming a cabinet-destroyer. I replaced the entire bottom and one of the sides on the cabinet that sat at ground-zero of the rotten mess in the kitchen.

Meanwhile in the kitchen the drywall has been installed and spackled, turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself. The top sub-layer of the floor is also installed and practically ready for tile.

To make the plumbing for the kitchen sink fit through the holes I made in the bottom of the cabinets I had to partially disassemble them, the hot-water valve was crummy anyway so I just replaced it with a new one, I even put a proper cap on the new valve instead of the kinked copper you see below.

I think the kinked copper is what will eventually go to a new dishwasher.

Finally tonight it was time to install the cabinet, I rounded up the troops and together we tested the durability of my labor. Lil' Davey on one end and The Glove on the other, I put my life (or at least limb...or at least cabinets) in their hands and crawled underneith to guide the plumbing into the holes. Coffee-House-Kate had a nice assist on the video.

It was a glorious moment for us all, but especially me. The sweet feeling of accomplishment swept over me in the name of progress.

Now to install the plumbing for the drains, etc...I've also noticed that the countertop itself is pretty rotten directly behind the sink...but am choosing to ignore that until the project wheel comes back around to the kitchen again after phase 1 is completed.

Before and after (well, middle) of ground-zero.

The stain that won't die.

So when I moved in the walls were covered with...everything. Grease, pencil, crayon, some kind of asian barbecue sauce. For the most part it either scrubbed off, scrapped off, or was covered well enough by a coat of kilz (a stain-fighting primer). Well there was one little seemingly insignificant spot of red under the bay-window in the living room that appeared to be crayon. I didn't take any before pictures because I didn't really expect/want it to be blog-worthy. Luckily for you, the reader, the epic amount of effort to remove or cover this stain has been completely ineffective and her disfigurement of my wall remains just as robust (if not worse) than the day I closed.

My best guess is that the spot is in fact lipstick. The initial wall scrub did very little and it repelled the kilz like Gilbert Gottfried at a sorority party. It barely faded with a more aggressive scrub/scrape with a cocktail of cleaning supplies harsh enough to start digging into the drywall paper.

I thought I had come up with an over-the-top solution when I decided to just cover it with a thick layer of drywall spackling. I smoothed out a good quarter-inch of it and called it good. Then I forgot about it until the next day when I noticed how it had dried...

Xanadon't: Putting lipstick on the wall.

New solution: Get violent. Dig until I don't see anymore red, then re-spackle over the mess I make of the wall.

If that doesn't work you may see another blog mention, otherwise you can assume all went well.

Here's a random picture of the furnace filter I recently replaced:

Xanadon't: letting 10 years go by before replacing your air-filter.

And Here's a random picture I took a few weeks ago of a serene flood-plane forrest with a thick coat of cottonwood seeds not far from the bank of the Mississippi River. I had to contrast the ugliness of the other pictures in this entry.