A 4 day crash course in tile appreciation

It's a little after 7:00 PM on Sunday here in the great city of Philadelphia, and I can barely move. In fact, Christina basically had to shovel food into my mouth tonight because my arms are barely functioning, not to mention my inability to walk. I know EVERYONE is saying to them selves "but Bryan, you're an Adonis and are as tough as the Terminator...how can you be sore? One Word.

Tile.

With that out there, let me back up just a few days. As a previous blog post mentioned, our friend (and weekend tile master) Niko had a date this weekend to lay some porcelain with me. Uh, what? Anyway, on Wednesday Niko shows up and between then and today I've learned the following items about myself, tiling, and the world:

1. Cement board is heavy.
   
2. Hardiebacker is heavy.
3. Quickrete is heavy.
   
4. 3.5 gal buckets of thin set are heavy
5. Wet saws are heavy (see#6). They suck, they are hard to work with, are loud and don't cut straight lines (for me I guess)
6. ALL of the above weight can be summed up with the following formula: final weight of an item = (listed gross weight x linear feet to be carried) x each stair step ³

It is also important to note that no weekend is complete without multiple trips to a hardware store of some kind. This weekend was no exception, with 10+ trips to Lowes, Home Depot, our local 1540 Hardware, and a new one just for kicks, C&R (Admittedly Christina made 75% of those trips). The fun part about all these trips to the hardware store is: you got it.......purchasing more heavy items that need to make their way up to the third floor.

At least we made some progress and there is some white tile on the walls, all the porcelain on the main part of the floor. So I guess most of the trips up the stairs were worth it. There is still one extra 60 LBS bag of quickrete that needs to make it back down three flights of stairs to the hardware store, but that is just not happening right now...or in the next few days.

Anyway, to the tile stuff. Niko handled laying the tile as well as letting me know when I was about to screw something up. Besides carrying up 10 cements boards and 10 hardiebackers up the third floor, my job was to lay all of the board. :) Honestly, it was pretty fun and easy to do. I did managed to almost break my foot with a cement board, I have a blistered right hand from the 800 + screws I drilled in, but it was sort of fun.

I'm weird.

Anyway, you can see some "moment in time" pictures that Christina took of the action. She was the General this weekend. She made sure that we knew what we were doing, and if there were any design questions, to defer to her (the project architect). Life can be good sometimes....

The status right now is that we're maybe 65% done. All of the hardiebacker is down, and the floor tile is done (no grout yet, that's last). I'm going to finish the last 1/5 of the cement board in the shower on Tuesday as I'm taking tomorrow off hopefully. Niko's tile cutter had some "problems" today, so you'll note that no cute tiles are on the walls. That's going to be later this week. What can you do.

I'm going to just sit now. Sit and stare off into the distance before treading up the damn stairs yet again.....why are we making our bedroom on the third floor again?