These Two Hands

So, I was supposed to have been done with tiling last week. In order to stay on schedule  for refinancing in mid-April, by when I want to have EVERYTHING TOTALLY FINISHED and already rented. Needless to say, things always take longer than I think they will.

Preparation took about half the time. It is so important to get the bottom-most row absolutely frickin’ perfectly level. And even if you do, odds are you’ll still find yourself inserting shims here and there as you climb the wall anyway. Cuz you want the seams to all line up, and stuff.

Those yellow clips are the LASH tile leveling system. They work pretty darn good – they pull adjacent tiles into the same plane so the faces are nice and flat with minimal “lippage”. I’m going to use them for everything from now on. Yes, they’re pricy – I think I bought 4 or 5 bags of clips for these two bathrooms, at $9 each – but totally worth it.

Of course if you have straighter walls, or you do a better (any?) job of leveling and shimming your studs before you actually install the cement board, you’d probably have less of a problem than I did. Ahem.

Getting close… only a few tiles left…

From all the abrasive thinset, and from wrestling stuck sharp tile edges for the past five days, my fingers feel like they have fire blisters on the tip of every single one.

At least Josh and the girls are helping me start the painting (what I was REALLY supposed to have been doing this week). I’d put a picture up, but one of the littles decided to do their painting with no pants on. Perhaps not a photo for the Christmas letter, then.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2018 at 10:24 am and is filed under rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.