Wednesday, October 29, 2008

We finally really absolutely definitely finish the tile

Monday morning bright and early two tile guys arrived to pop off the glass tiles, clean them and then put them back in their own special place on the walls. It was supposed to be completed within approximately eight hours but when I came home nine hours later my heart sunk a bit when I saw the huge tile trailer still parked outside the house.

They were very close to finishing but they both had quizzical looks on their faces and were walking around the kitchen holding up pieces of glass tile against the wall, turning the tile 45 degrees and holding it up again. I asked them how it was going and they said,"great but we can't quite figure out why we've used more tiles than you had up there to begin with, plus the three extra tiles you had and we're still one short. We had to break one tile to make a space to pop out the rest, and one tile broke as we were cutting it but there should still be one extra tile since you had three extra to begin with." Turns out they had pulled them all off and then put them in a bucket of water to soak off the mastik. I had wondered to myself ahead of time how they were going to keep track of which cut tiles went where but apparently that concern hadn't been part of their thought process. Consequently manys tile probably found a new home on the wall.

There were a couple of phone calls out on the front porch with I can only assume to be the boss and then they told me there were extra tiles at their store. That was good because I thought I was going to have to order one tile and wait two weeks to get it. They came back the next morning to put up that final tile and grout. When I came home last night everything looked awesome-------except for the fact that the switch plate for the light switch had about a 3/8 inch gap between the wall and the back of the switch plate. The plate is half in tile and half flat against the wall and they hadn't cut the tile to fit around the bottom of the switch plate.

That meant instead of being finished yesterday, I had to call with my concern and they showed up again bright and early this morning. To make a long story short, instead of repairing the light switch tile problem, I/we decided to take all those extra ceramic tiles we had too many of when our initial decorating plan didn't work and tile up to the base of the cabinets and a couple of rows up on the other walls. And believe it or not, even though I changed my whole "repair" plan in mid-stream, they had time to do it today AND were finished by the time I got home tonight.

Here's a slide show of the final really absolutely definitely finished kitchen tile.


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4 comments:

Leslie said...

That looks awesome! I'd have to say I was one of the just leave it people but it looks a ton better!

Unknown said...

I'm glad you're finally happy!

doreen said...

Looks GREAT...

Corner Gardener Sue said...

I love your kitchen! It's always something when you hire people to do work in your house. I'm glad the tile turned out so well. Trevor and Linda have a friend working on the house Linda grew up in, and they plan to move into. He is working too slowly for Linda, and we are telling her that it's not just him.

We had to get our shed repaired this summer, and had a terrible time getting people to come out, and one group that did, didn't get back with an estimate. They just called this evening to see if we still needed the shed repaired! They said they got busy and were just getting caught up.