It’s Good To Be Broke

The dentist was one of many who had their hand out over the past week. I was pretty much picked clean by Friday and payday isn’t until Thursday, so my options were limited as to what I could do on the bathroom. As it is, it could be beans and rice by Wednesday here at the old Petch House. One good thing about being broke is that I took care of a few things that were, shall we say, revenue neutral. These are things that have been put off for one reason or another, but that don’t cost anything because I have the supplies on hand.

I did have enough money to buy some grout on Friday, so I was able to grout the subway tile in the bathroom. No pictures, but it came out really nice. I bought two boxes, and hoped I could return one if I didn’t need it. Wouldn’t you know, it took 1.1 boxes of grout to do the room. I used “Snow White” grout, which still looks a little gray, and that’s the reason for no pictures, and I’m planning on doing gray for the tile on the floor. I have no plans to do any more tile in the near future, so I now have 9 pounds of snow white grout that I don’t know what to do with. I suppose it will end up out in the garage with the other partial bags and cans of things until it turns hard as a rock and I throw it away in a few years. Oh, the waste.

One of the revenue neutral things I accomplished was painting the last wall of the house. After spending who knows how many months last year painting the house, you would think that I would have finished, but no. There was one wall with the new stained glass window that still needed to be painted. It was sunny and really windy today, which, while irritating, actually worked out well. The paint dried so fast I was able to get a coat of primer on and two top coats with three different colors. So the house is now finished…..except for the skirting and the front door, which is no big deal.

The really big thing I did, or at least started to do, was to finish the marble slab on the kitchen island. I had routed the edges with a simple round-over, but never really finished them, mainly because I wasn’t sure how. Someone left a message on the blog months back saying that I could do it with sandpaper, but I was hesitant to make the $350 slab of marble my guinea pig. I had already used it as a guinea pig for the router, and that went over with less than stunning results.

However, a month or so back I installed the marble sill in the bathroom window and I used it as a test piece for finishing the edges with sandpaper. It’s shockingly simple. I should have done it a year ago. All of this time friends have been coming over and seeing the unfinished edges of the marble on my beautiful island. I get this sort of polite, “Oh, it’s nice”, but all the while I’m sure they’re thinking, “It’s nice, but he butchered the marble”. Well, butcher no more.

I start with 100 grit and work through 150, 180, 220, and finally wet sand with 300. I think I must have honed marble and not polished marble, because the 300 grit gets it damn near perfect. I may go over it once more with 600 and see how that looks. So far I’ve completed 2 sides, so I have 2 more sides plus the sink hole. It looks pretty damn good so far.

Oh, and I cleaned some more of the damned Oberon Saloon tile. Oh, how I hate that tile - and love it at the same time. If it ever gets installed it would look great.