Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Hardwood and Slate Floors

It's quite ironic: when lots of things are happening and we're very busy, I have the least amount of time to update the blog, but those are exactly the times when blog updates would be the most interesting. Anyway, last weekend was packed with goings-on.

Friday, our slate/thinset/grout was delivered to us. I stayed until about 11:30 that night putting backerboard down.

Saturday, the floor guys put the final coat of polyurethane on the hardwood floors. They look fantastic, especially compared with their original condition; we're very happy with the way they turned out.



Dad helped out a lot on Saturday putting backerboard down while I set slate. Laying the slate is particularly tough work. The pieces are 16" square and around 1/2 inch thick, so they're just bulky and heavy enough to be cumbersome. It's harder than laying tile also because of the severe irregularity of the slate; some pieces are not exactly square, some are quite smaller than the rest, and some are quite thinner. It's like you have to be deliberately and carefully imprecise in order to make it all look square and the joints look consistent--it's very odd.





Sunday I worked on slate from after lunch until dark. Jessica tiptoed across the new floors to the hall bathroom where she cleaned grout off the edges of tiles. Monday morning, we bought a new water heater (to be installed this week). Then Jessica headed to the duplex to start packing stuff while I, of course, continued laying slate.


It was a crazy weekend, and the next one will be even more so. We committed to moving out by the end of the month, and now we're working hard to deliver on that. We'll be moving into a renovation-in-progress house, and whether we have a working bathroom sink and a refrigerator will depend on how much work we can get done over these next few days. We don't want to bring the fridge in until the slate is done, and we don't want to install the sink and toilet until the baseboards in the bathroom are done. Papa is coming down Thursday to help Jessica with that and other things; I'll be slinging slate like a madman; and we'll both be sorting through our stuff at the duplex (How in the world have we accumulated so much stuff already??) to see what needs to be kept/packed, given away, and thrown out.

We'll be praying for peace, sanity, and energy.

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