Er.... What were we supposed to do again?

Lovely Saltillo tile dries out in the dining room after being sealed a few times....

Well... we got everything out of the laundry room as planned by around 3pm yesterday. I started laying out tiles to see which ones we would use and how they would fit in the room and so on (pretending like I knew what I was doing the whole time)... And we realized that we didn't have a wet saw to cut the tile for along the walls.

Dave made a dash for Lowe's while I drew chalk lines on the floor and moved heavy tiles from one corner to the other until I was thoroughly bored. It wasn't long before curiosity got the best of me and I ran outside to start mixing mortar. Oh what fun mortar is! Now.. If you've never mixed mortar before -- it's no big deal, right? It's just like mixing cake batter!! Er.. but you know when I mix cake batter I am too impatient to slowly blend ingredients together and end up dumping it all in the bowl and once and mixing. Then of course I have to spend an hour and a half smashing all the little lumps up with the back of my spoon.....

Did I mention that I made a cake yesterday too? Yeah. It fell into tiny pieces when I tried to frost it - so I ended up putting the whole mess in a big bowl and we ate it with a spoon.

Ahem. So I knew that I should slowly blend the mortar mix with water to avoid lumps.. and I tried.. I mean really tried. Or at least I intended to try. But trying to slowly pour fifty pounds of mortar into a bucket while stirring the water with your other hand is a bit difficult. I think that's why the 'installation tips' say it's helpful to have a couple of people around.... It took about 15 seconds for me to accidentally drop the contents of the entire bag of mortar mix into the bucket. When Dave got home I was still mashing the lumps out of the mortar.

Now I should also mention that the bag said I would have four hours to use this bucket of mortar before it dried out on me. At the time, that sounded like a really long time.

Dave had to set up the saw and figure out how to use it and I still had to get those infernal lumps out of my mortar... So that when I dumped the first glob of mortar on the floor the clock had already ticked away a good three hours of my four hour time limit. I wasted at least another thirty minutes staring at my glob of mortar on the floor and thinking to myself 'What the heck am I doing? I haven't the slightest clue what I'm supposed to do with this gook... ' Needless to say - I didn't get to use that entire batch of mortar -- and a good thing too since the next batch was much better without so many lumps.

By 2 am I felt like a pro. I was making all sorts of great globbing and scraping noises with the trowel... I mean if I had just been listening a room away or so I would have guessed that whoever was making all that noise knew what they were doing. I don't think my skill level had improved at all over those few hours of laying tile -- I think I was just too tired to care anymore... But - hey - that works, too.

We used up our mixed mortar before passing out -- but had to finish laying tile this morning. Somewhere along the line we gained enough confidence to actually chip out a couple of tiles we didn't like and replace them... There was one tile in particular that had a variation on the rustic animal print -- there were two impressions from the bottom of a glass bottle on the face of the tile. Now - this particular tile was not even close to square and - as we found out AFTER mortaring it in place - was substantially smaller than the other 90 tiles. For future reference - a saltillo tile imprinted with beer bottles is a good indication that less than superior craftsmanship went into that particular tile.

Like snowflakes or fingerprints - no two of these tiles are alike... That sounds real pretty
until you're trying to lay a few of them in a relatively straight line.

Now that there is Saltillo tile stuck to the laundry room floor (is that the technical term for it?)... I have to take a few minutes to find out what to do next. I think I'm supposed to wait for the mortar to set and then clean it.. then seal it again... (or do I clean it then seal it then clean it again -- or am I supposed to wait until after I grout to seal again?) then grout. Ah -- yes -- I should probably find out how to grout while I'm here.....

To be continued....