Lynda's Birthday

The picture of the antique school desk was Lynda's birthday present. We actually got it a couple months ago and very cleverly hid it in the cab of Kevin Jr's truck with the blown up engine. Yes, the same truck that was the subject of a blog post last year about taking the transmission out and living to tell the story. As you can see, a desk like this is a perfect fit in our house. The desk, much like the house, has a very high "cool factor" rating and because of that, it gets to be part of the craziness of our project. This blog post will give you an idea of what it's like to celebrate your birthday at the Farmville Reality Project. It's not for everyone but I do believe the birthday girl had a great day.

The pampering began very early that morning with me making sure she got to sleep in until almost 6:15 am. About that time, the cats were acting like they needed to be fed or they would simply kill and eat us, so we got the day started. A quick happy birthday card exchange, usual morning routine of coffee and tea, sort of healthy breakfast food stuff, and we were on our way to tile a bathroom floor. I know what you're thinking, this guy goes far beyond ridicules when it comes to helping people celebrate their birthday. I guess it's one of my strong suits.

Once we got to the house and gathered the tools, we did a quick huddle to make sure we knew what we were doing and what the final product would be. The final product would be an 8 foot by 8 foot floor of one inch white hex tiles. At very well thought out locations, there would be black hex tiles arranged in a snowflake pattern. The idea for the floor came from a blend of many different pictures we had looked at the past few months, actual places we went and visited, as well as what materials we could find in our price range. That led us to the tiles I posted pictures of and described in this post, http://thefarmvillerealityproject.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html. Through a strange twist of fate, today, Lynda's birthday was the day to get these installed.

As mentioned above, these are small, one inch hex shaped tiles and to get the snowflake pattern, it meant taking some of the black ones from some sheets to use in place of white ones on the sheets where a snowflake was to be. We did this prep work a few days prior so there were empty spots where each of the two different colors needed to be relocated to. The plan would be to install the sheets and put the relocated tiles in place as we moved across the floor.

Like all good plans, this one was little short of being realistic. We spread a section of thinset (you do remember that stuff, don't you?) and placed four sheets down. After a few minutes of over-the-top perfectionist type of adjustments, it was time to place the tiles to finish the pattern. This went fairly smooth except the thinset dried very fast in the heat, so we had to smear some more on each little tile before putting it in place. This made a bit of a mess that had to be cleaned because once thinset dries hard, it is literally like cement. Much easier to clean goopy excess up while it's still wet. Now onto the next four sheets. This is where things started going downhill. The small amount in between the tiles sticking out had dried and needed to be scraped up and new thinset troweled down so the new row of tiles would set correctly. About the only tool that worked right was my finger. A knife, screwdriver, or trowel tip were too awkward. If you misjudged and caught just a little bit of the edge of a tile already laid down, it would break its bond and cause it to pop up. The problem with using your finger is it is not as durable as the metal tools and it wears out over time from the abrasiveness of the surfaces being cleaned. Long story short, bloody finger tips that hurt really bad. That tends to slow things up. We kept plowing along though. We would spread thinset, place sheets of tile and then to the painstakingly, labor intensive process of filling in the snowflakes. As time went on, we seemed to go slower and slower. I asked her more than once if she was having a fun birthday and she always said yes every time. I hope she isn't hard at work planning something as equally torturous for my birthday next year.

As darkness forced us to scrounge up work lights, we did a survey and both of us agreed we needed to keep working and get the floor finished. By this time, some of the lay out lines were not lining up right and the thinset seemed to be drying almost instantly as it was troweled down. I could go on about how we kept our heads down and kept working but truth be told, only one of us did that. It was a she, if that helps solve which one us worked tirelessly without complaint. Don't misunderstand me, I kept working too. One thing every one who knows me will agree on, I never quit working until the job is finished. I just complained the whole time about how tired and sore I was. Somewhere pushing 10:00pm that night, the last tiles went down at the point where the doorway meets the hallway and we both breathed a huge sigh of relief. We had completely blown past the stage of being tired and were exhausted. I did what I do best at that point and grumbled about some of the places that got crooked and didn't line up right. Lynda looked at the floor and said it looked great to her and then we drove the long drive back to find refuge in a nice soft bed for our tired selves.










As you can see from the picture, the snowflakes turned out great and I have to admit, they were well worth the effort. The floor of our bathroom truly does give it a historical look and we both know it's durable enough to last a hundred years into the future. Hopefully someday, many years from now, folks will appreciate how a birthday was spent making such a beautiful floor in this old house. Happy Birthday!

Turning the Corner...Sort of

As you can see by the pictures with this post, some pretty good progress is being made in getting the bathroom ready to be functional. In fact the title of this post came to me while working on the subway tile walls. Being under a big time crunch to get this room finished so we can move in, my judgement can be a little bit to the left of that place everyone calls "good judgement". The excuse for my poor judgement is too many things to deal with and not enough resources to use in dealing with them. The biggest gaps in resources for this particular adventure were time, running water, and common sense. Time still seems to be an issue with most everything I do that involves completing a project. Then again, the common sense thing comes up more times than it should in this area too. But the running water part of this thing is solved. As you can see in two of these pictures, there is a brand new pump delivering water to our relocated Farmville Reality Project. Enough water, as a matter of fact, that we could probably run a hose out to the dry creek bed a little west of here and run enough water to get a few salmon interested in spawning. OK, maybe I exaggerate just a little.... It is nice to have this detail taken care of since the old pump was not working well enough to even get a small part of the Bermuda grass lawn green. The new set-up also has an outlet valve aimed right toward where the orchard/vineyard/garden/pasture will be in the future.
Now back to to topic of this post, turning the corner. My previous mention of being short on resources happened when I decided to tile the walls with subways tiles. I had already helped the pump guy get the humongous water tank out the building so he could use his boom-truck to swing it around and into its new location. That meant he could get busy pulling the old pump out of the well and put the new pump down in there. Using my superior math skills, it was determined I had a few hours to get started on something and tiling a wall in a subway pattern came up from a Google search, so that was what I went with. That's the part where common sense could have come in handy. Even though there was no running water, there was water in a couple 5 gallon jugs. I had already measured and scribed the layout lines on the wall, so I figured spreading tile adhesive (thinset to those who do this for a living) and sticking tiles on the wall would be a pretty easy way to spend my afternoon. With this thought in mind, I poured a generous amount of water in the bucket and poured almost the entire bag of dry thinset mix in there. This is when I discovered the first clue this might be a long afternoon. I couldn't find the big drill I use the mixing paddle on to use in stirring this stuff up. Looked high and low and still haven't found it. Since the other drills are too small and would burn their motors up if I tried to make them do this hard of a job, I mixed the thinset up the old fashioned way, by hand. After the second mixing and most of the lumps gone, I only paused a couple seconds to admire the Popeye-like muscles you develop by mixing this stuff up manually and went to work. The first couple rows went smooth with only some minor mishaps. That was about the time I noticed the thinset was getting very stiff and dry. When this happens, you need to stir it up but should not add any water to thin it out because that ultimately weakens its bonding ability. No problem. I'm a little tired and the afternoon heat has settled on that side of the house but if it needs to be stirred a couple minutes then so be it. It's actually good exercise for those that need a good workout. Think of stirring 50 pounds of bread dough with a big spoon to try and keep it from rolling up into a ball. Kind of like that. Then onto another couple more rows and it needs some more stirring. This time (and every time after that, but don't tell the tile police on me) I sprinkled some water in there to help get this goop back to a state where it could be spread and troweled onto the wall. Did I mention how tired I was at this point and how hot it was? Did I also mention how much would not stick to the wall if you didn't push the trowel with superhuman strength? The stuff that didn't stick would usually fall all over the rows that had just been set and cleaned. I could go on and on describing this but I think we've achieved some basic understanding that tile work is not fun, especially at the end of the day when you're already tired and the room you're tiling is like a sauna. Needless to say, by the time that wall was finished and the big bucket of thinset was all used up, I felt like I had been trampled by horses and tossed from the roof of a one story building. Oh well, at least the longest wall was finished and I had the next day to knock out the other two smaller walls. Of course, to be able to tile this wall in the too few of hours available before darkness set in, I had to skip the corners because every tile needed to be cut to fit. It seemed like a better idea to save that for the next day.

The next day came and that's when I settled into cutting all of the corner tiles. Still being worn out from the day before, this seemed to take a very long time. It really seemed like a lot of work and very little progress. That was up until I set the last one to finish the corners. Once that one was in place, it's funny how "complete" the walls now looked from just that one part being done. As I looked at the now finished corners, it seemed like the bathroom project as a whole was turning the corner from the torn up mess of demolition to now actually resembling what it is destined to become. It's funny how one small step can take you from a part of the journey that feels like no forward progress is being made to another part where the destination starts to come into focus. The focus for the hall bathroom is starting to get clearer and that is a very welcome sight for all of us.