….because we don’t have one yet.

First I’m going to tell you about one of the quick and easy projects I’ve been trying to do more of to help me cope with how agonizingly slow tiling is. Then I’ll whine about tiling some more. You are all welcome to leave after the non-whining part if you’d like ;).

I’ve had these these Thomas Paul Sea Life melamine plates on my Amazon wish list for awhile now, because they’re beautiful and: lobster! My friend Tracy bought me a set of them for Christmas, and I’ve been meaning to hang them up in the kitchen. Eventually I’d love to get a bigger collection of them and maybe keep them out on our screen porch (once it’s less ugly) to use when we cook out. But for now, they’re too pretty to keep in a cabinet, and the kitchen’s been crying out for some color on the walls.

When I did my plate wall in the sunroom, I bought fancy plate hangers for all the plates. But since these were pretty pricey, and since the melamine plates were a lot lighter than those plates, I hunted around for another solution. I remembered reading somewhere or other about using paper clips as plate hangers, so I searched for that and found this tutorial on In My Own Style. Basically, you put a generous glob of hot glue on the back of the plate, then stick a slightly bent at the top paperclip into it:

 

And then, I hung them all up all by myself, and they’re even in a straight line!

They’ve been up for almost a week now, and no plates have fallen yet!

And now for the tiling update:

A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling totally realistic about how long the tiling might take. I would not have been surprised to see March show up with a still untiled floor.

But then there was a long weekend ahead of us, and it made me feel delusionally optimistic. “Maybe we won’t get to the grout until Monday, but we can definitely get all the tile laid by Sunday night!” I proclaimed cheerily. By Sunday afternoon we had….some tile laid, and I had to leave to take the kids to a birthday party. “Maybe Dave will be pretty much all finished by the time I get back,” I secretly hoped.

You can probably see where this is going. We spent much of the weekend working on tile, and we’ve laid out maybe half of it now. And that’s all that’s getting done until next Sunday (Saturday is Abe’s party), because, with as much prep work and clean up is involved, there’s no point in trying to get anything done weekday evenings.

Here’s what it looks like now (more or less):

Here’s what we’ve learned about tiling so far:

1. It takes ONE MILLION years.

2. We’re not very good at it.

I told Dave that if we had had a practice bathroom to do first, we’d have to kill ourselves be pretty good by the time we got to the real bathroom. I’ll just get this out of the way right now, so that I don’t need to go on an on about it when we finally get to the big reveal: our tiling job does not look very professional. Our big problem is with levelness:

 

(I honestly have no perspective on this whatsoever anymore, after microanalyzing our tiling job all weekend. I have no clue if people are going to be so disgusted by our amateur tiling shenanigans that they stop reading the blog, or if they’ll be like, “what on earth is she going on and ON about?!”)

We’ve gotten a lot better at this as we’ve gone along (although we’re still far from perfect, but I’m thinking at a certain point we’ve done all we can, and we get to place some blame on either the tiles themselves or the floors in our not so new house). The problem with getting better as you go along, of course, is that you start right smack in the middle of the room with tiling, so all your shoddy first attempts get center stage.

I’m really hoping our not so level tiles don’t drive us insane for the next 40 years or so. While Dave was feeling very sorry for himself about the whole thing, he commented on the hex tile that runs between the toilet and shower and how completely and totally flat it is. It really is. It’s amazing. Superheroes must have put in that tile because regular people like us never could have done it.

This made me curious, though, so I went downstairs and checked out the terracotta tile in our sunroom. Whoa. So not level (difficult to illustrate with photography. I should have put something….like, say, a LEVEL on there to make it clearer how mountainous it is):

Now. We pretty much think that the sunroom is a poorly constructed piece of crap. Albeit a lovely one in which we spend a lot of time. So “we’re as good at tiling as the people who tiled the sunroom!” isn’t really the highest praise. But! While we have a very long list of complaints about how things were done in the sunroom, while we’ve pretty much made a hobby of noticing things that suck about the sunroom, we have never once noticed that the tile laying is roller coaster-esque.

So you see? This gives me hope! That our crappy tile job will be similarly dwarfed into invisibility by all the OTHER things we’re going to get wrong in the bathroom! Ahem.

The sunroom terracotta, it should be noted, has a couple of things going for it in the flaw-hiding department:

1. slightly rounded edges

2. wide grout lines

3. it’s supposed to look rustic. You don’t want a perfectly level floor in your Tuscan villa! what’s the fun of that?

But, whatever. That’s pretty much all I can say about it at this point because those suckers are mortared down and they aren’t moving anymore.

Hey! It’s the longest blog post in the history of the universe about how we DIDN’T get a project done this weekend! Whee! What about you? What did you not do this weekend?

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