Day 119

I started The Oberon Saloon tile odyssey on January 9th. That was 119 days ago. Although I am starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, it feels like I haven’t seen the worst of it yet. At the risk of appearing to be whining about it, I want to say once again just how unpleasant cleaning the grout off the tile is. It’s fun to complain about some things, paint stripping being way up on the list, but something like that just doesn’t even compare to how miserable a job this is.

I got the last of the tile in to the bleach bath today. This allows me to get the most accurate count yet of how much tile I have. Since most of it has now been stacked and counted I only need to estimate what is in the tubs. It looks like I’m going to come in right at about 125 sq ft of tile. I estimated the little mudroom and bathroom to be about 90 sq ft, so it looks very good. Even if you factor in 5% loss during installation that still leaves me with about 30 sq ft of extra tile. This means I won’t need to use a lot of the tile that wouldn’t come clean. Off the top of my head I would say that is less than 10 sq ft of tile.

As I mentioned a few days ago, when I first started pulling tile off the floor of the saloon I was using any box I found laying around. After the first or second day, I started using boxes that were all the same size so I could sort of estimate how much I was getting. Those first 4 or 5 odd sized boxes of tile were the last to go in to the bleach bath today. As it turns out, these boxes contained some of the best tiles. I hadn’t opened the boxes since I filled and closed them up last January, but I guess I was pretty picky those first days. The tiles are some of the cleanest of all and have virtually no chips. Sadly, they have just as much grout as the other tiles.

So, as it stands now, there are 7 more boxes that need to have the grout removed. That's seven boxes of de-grouting hell. Even if I work on it every day that is easily 2 weeks worth of work. Siiigh!!!


PS: It just dawned on me that I'm in Month Five of working on the bathroom. How can it be taking so long? I think I only spent 9 months on the kitchen. Maybe the kitchen was more like 15 months but I blacked out for several of them.