Mortar City Madness

The kitchen floor by the numbers:

Kitchen square footage: 230
Drywall screws: 530
Boxes of tile: 25
Sheets of Hardiebacker: 15
50 lb bags of mortar: 7
Home Depot buckets: 3
Drill bits broken: 2
Screwdrivers burned out: 1
Pairs of gloves worn through: 1
Painted-over mummified mice found in electrical outlets: 1

After spending virtually all of our after-work free time this week scraping, chiseling and sanding the linoleum and particle board off the kitchen floor, early Saturday morning (actual morning - we're Old People now, so no overnighters for us) we FINALLY FINISHED the demolition!

 The better the inside of our house looks, the more garbage ends up in our yard.

All that particle board? It's now outside in a pile. It'll go to the dump eventually, but right now we're really just hoping it doesn't rain. And that no one calls in a nuisance complaint for trash and debris. 

Or, for that matter, a noise complaint regarding my impact driver. The Hardieboard backer we're using requires 35 screws to hold it in place. The floor squeaks I'd been chasing around have been miraculously fixed with the backer board installed, despite my earlier unsuccessful attempts to eradicate them - my method involved tapping around with my foot to locate the squeak, then attacking it with eight or nine drywall screws. With the backer board, nothing is going to squeak, ever again. 

And speaking of squeaking - once we pulled out the fridge to pull up the particle board underneath, I noticed something small and gray lodged in the side of the uncovered outlet box. My first thought was that it was a misplaced cat toy or blob of flooring glue. Wrong on both accounts - it was a mummified mouse that the previous owners had PAINTED OVER rather than try to remove. "I'm taking a picture of it!" I said, to which my alarmed husband replied, "You're taking it outside is what you're doing."

It's my blog, and if I want to post a picture of a 

mummified mouse, YOU CAN'T STOP ME.

I really really wanted to sew it a tiny dress and pose it like one of the creepy naturalist dioramas at Paxton Gate, but I also really really want to stay married, so...the mouse was properly disposed of. Sigh.

After working twelve straight hours on Saturday, we'd only gotten about a third of the backerboard mortared into place. On Sunday morning, Incredible Builder Mom showed up like Prometheus bringing fire and sustenance to the shivering cave dwellers, and informed us that not only was our mortar way too thick, the directions on the mortar package, despite having dire warnings about adding too much water, were really more like guidelines than actual rules. As such, we'd been working with mortar the consistency of cold congealed oatmeal, and it needed to be more like chocolate pudding. No wonder we had blisters and incredibly sore arms! 

It just looks like I'm attacking Jesse with mud. 

With Mom's invaluable help, we got the rest of the backerboard down and taped, and ready for the tiling to begin. 

 All taped up and squared up for layout.

Jesse was the mortar mixologist. 

This picture was taken approximately 45 seconds before my cordless drill started smoking. 

Apparently 50 lbs of mortar is too much for a tiny drill motor.

Sadly, it's much much harder to mix without the drill.

Laying tile with STYLE. 

We got INCREDIBLY LUCKY in that not only is the kitchen itself mostly square, 

so was the island, and the edges will only require very minimal cuts. 

Here we are, working on tiling ourselves into a corner. 

And this is where we called it quits for the day.

IT'S GOING TO LOOK AMAZING.

We're not done yet - we still need to lay out and cut the tile along the very edges, but we're 90% done with the tile itself, and the kitchen already looks about a thousand percent better. Although it's going to really suck to grout, the tiny mosaic tiles were very forgiving in terms of placement, and we knocked out seventeen boxes of tile in the space of a couple hours. 

On the agenda this week: 

- Delivery of new wood for the upstairs floor

- Lay out, cut and mortar the rest of the kitchen tile

- If time permits, finish stripping paint on garage door windows, cut remaining boards and finish garage door

The last part is sort of critical, because Dad's coming home this weekend, and he's going to want his miter saw back to finish Mom's greenhouse, and I am going to cry. Seriously. I may need to stand on the deck, forlornly waving a white handkerchief as he drives it away. 

For next weekend: 

- Grout! We're going to be grouting until our arms fall off. Then we're going to grab the float with our teeth and grout until those fall out too. SO MUCH GROUT.