Major accomplishment this week: I tiled!
With Adam’s patient hand-holding (he’s still out of commission with a work-related injury), I tiled and grouted the bathroom. It is completely amazing if I do say so, but honestly all the credit goes to Adam’s experience! He learned how to do all kinds of impressive stuff as a young lad in Minnesota, including how to survive in the woods for a week with only a knife and a metal match, how to raise ducks, how to drive a four-horse-drawn wagon, how to legpress slabs of silestone, and, of course, tiling (which is obviously the least impressive of his skills).
So, this is how you tile (and if I can do it, anyone can do it!):
1. First, I ripped out the ugly linoleum floor.
2. Then I screwed down Hardie Backer to the subfloor. Hardie Backer is a cement board that helps stabilize the tiles so they don’t crack. We were lucky that the floors were nice and level. If the floor wasn’t level, we would have had to use self-leveling concrete as a base instead of Hardie Backer. Hardie Backer is also good because it resists moisture (important in a bathroom!).
3. Then I laid out all the tiles, and Adam cut the ones that needed to be resized with a wet saw. Also, I made sure the floor was swept clean so the mortar would stick.
4. Then I applied mortar with a notched trowel (we used a 1/4” one because the tiles were 12 x 12) and laid the tiles down as I went. I used little plastic jack-shaped things to make the spaces even (1/4”).
5. After all the tiles were down, the mortar had to cure for a couple days.
6. After that, I ground down any uneven spots in between the tiles with a blade. I mixed up some grout, and spread it all over the tiles.
7. After waiting ten minutes or so, I scrubbed the grout off the surface of the tiles with a sponge and water. I had to do this three or four times, and the last couple of times, I mixed in some stuff that’s supposed to help remove grout haze.
8. Then I let the grout dry overnight, washed it down twice more, and voila, a tiled floor!
Inspector Mully checks things out
Come on, how cool is that? And what a huge improvement to the aesthetics of the house.
The rest of today was occupied with the following:
-lugging the dirt out of the basement that was a result of deepening the sump pump hole
-finishing painting the bathroom doors
-raking the yard
-replacing the sheetrock we had to cut out of the bathroom walls:
-my dad did lots of plumbing (more on that in a second)
-and, lots of playing with Mulligan:
As far as the plumbing: my dad is kind enough to redo all of our plumbing since a lot of the pipes were very corroded. Unfortunately, after an entire day of plumbing work, he discovered that several of the copper Shark Bite clinchers were defective, and whenever the water is turned on, it rains in the basement. Not good at all.
Big bummer. It all has to be redone.
Expenses:
-a tank bolt kit for fixing our toilet, another 4 sheets of Hardie Backer, a doormat (!!!) = $49.73
-returned tank bolt kit= –$4.45
-wax gasket for bottom of toilet $2.09
-(not adding these items since I paid with store credit for the dehumidifier I returned, but I’ll list them) 26 oz grout admix, grout haze remover, a ShopVac, and 25# of Smoke Grey grout= $71.98 (got $10 off with a coupon I had, score!)
Total $$$ spent so far on renovating: $7326.42
Could have gotten a nice truck and horse trailer with living quarters instead!
We are house/dog-sitting this week, plus I got a phone call on Saturday that my grandfather was in the hospital, so we went to visit him at South Shore hospital. 
