The Drake Learns About Tile - The Hard Way
Much progress has been made on the kitchen project, but I'm getting impatient. Saturday saw the tabletop and supporting underframe go into place, but the efforts to install the tile top have been both tedious and, at times, comical. Saturday evening was devoted to mastering the wet saw, as it quickly became apparent that the tile I was using was too big to cut diagonally. Or, should I say, the wet saw cutting surface was too small. As a result, I spent the entire evening sitting on the floor, surrounded by now-ruined towels, turning seventy, 7-7/8" ceramic tiles into seventy, 6-5/8" tiles. Messy, tedious, neck strain-inducing work, I can assure you. Once completed, I found that I now had many more design options, as I had also created seventy, 1-1/4"x7-7/8" and seventy, 1-1/4"x6-5/8" border pieces.

It was my goal to be able to show the blogging world my masterpiece in place, but it was not to be. Turns out, it's real easy to fuck up setting tile, especially when you're in a hurry. And also, when you've got a fifteen-year-old son helping who's even more impatient than you are.

After it became clear that the Seattle Seahawks would be the Steelers' next victim on their inexorable rise to football greatness, me and the boy rushed to the kitchen to get the tile set, based on my dry run of the previous night. Working on opposite sides of the table, we wrestled with the white goo that would hold the tile secure on the tabletop and that goofy, notched trowel that you're supposed to use to get maximum stick. The crucial error came with the placement of the very first tile, which I guess is how it always goes. A single, tan-colored tile must be centered and squared relative to the tabletop in order for my design to be implemented. Drawing an intersecting cross from the parallel edges and marking the tile at the centerpoint of each of the four edges turns out to not be the best way to ensure correct placement. Nor is it a good idea to try and position the surrounding pieces until the (correctly) centered piece has been allowed to set.

After two hours of traipsing down this ill-fated path, I came to the sudden realization that my centered diamond pattern was not at all centered, and that my tile line was not going to line up with my tabletop edge. This led to a panicked call to the boy to get his ass back into the kitchen and help me pull up all the tile and scrape off the adhesive before it dried and turned my Saturday evening's tile cutting endeavor into the ultimate exercise in futility.

It was eleven o'clock at this point, and the boy was complaining loud and long about needing to go to bed, because he needed to get up for school today. It's amazing how important sleep and getting up on time for school become to a teenage, when the only other available activity is work. Equally amazing is how well it works. So after making sure that all of the tile was securely underwater, I sent him off to bed and spent yet another hour cleaning and drying off my rescued tile.

Underscoring my urgency on this point is the fact that I'm locked into this tile thing, by virtue of having enough tile laying around for free, having spent hours cutting it to fit the tool that cost me over a hundred bucks to buy for just this purpose, AND having witnessed one of the most horrific tragedies involving ceramic tile that could ever happen to a do-it-yourself-er with big ambitions and limited funds.

The boy and I were at Lowe's last Thursday in the garden center, buying seeds and starter pots for flowers and herbs, and chatting up the plant lady for tips on how to deal with some of our more troublesome house plants. On the way to the car, I observed a man tip over a shopping cart top-loaded with over a half-dozen boxes of ceramic tile -- a modest investment of at least two or three hundred bucks. It's one of those nightmarish, slow-motion, moments that people experience when they fully realize the impact of an impending, catastrophic loss and the simultaneous realization that's there's not a damn thing they can do to prevent it. For me, looking in from the outside, my attention was jerked towards this poor soul by the sudden going down of him and his cart, and the nearly instanteous sound of breaking ceramic and a fully-grown man screaming like a wounded animal.

Needless to say, I'm glad it wasn't me, but I sure am being damn careful with my mother lode of tile. It might take me the rest of the week to finish this part of the job, I'm so conscious of looming ceramic disaster.
- posted by The Drake @ 1:23 PM