I’m so tired this is going to be a short one. The wallpaper was very stressful but turned out okay? It looks good from a trotting horse, as my Aunt Vi would say. And when I install the much weaker and more romantic light fixture, my mistakes should be even harder to spot.
As if that weren’t enough for the day, I also rented a tile cutter from Home Depot and cut and laid out the floor tile that I’ll install tomorrow morning. This took 6 hours, no joke, and it’s the last time I’m ever using a tile cutter for large-format tile. A tile cutter works by scoring the tile along a line with a diamond carbide blade, and then a padded bar attached to the cutting arm sets down across the score line and snaps the tile in two. Supposedly. The Internet warned me it would be tricky to use with porcelain tile, and it was right: the more brittle substrate tended to break in crazy directions, even during scoring. I had the most success with making several light passes with the cutting wheel (which you’re specifically instructed *not* to do), and then snapping. I didn’t waste too much tile, but almost certainly more than if I had rented a wet saw. The problem was the 24” wet saw weighs 150 lbs, and there was no way I could get it in and out of the car myself, not to mention the set up and tear down being a bit ridiculous for cutting 12 tiles. But I probably should have talked to the Home Depot guys about delivery and pick-up because I think I would have had less wastage. There was one super-tricky long notch cut for the HVAC vent that I’m not sure would have survived the wet saw either, but there was no way I could do it with the Roto-Zip (which otherwise was the MVP once again for helping me cut smaller notches and curves around the toilet flange without shattering the tile, with the Dry Diamond Wheel; man, was there a lot of tile dust in my hair and clothes by the end of all that—don’t worry, I wore a respirator, goggles, and ear plugs—your girl is not an idiot and does not want to die of silicosis). So, I resorted to a couple of short skinny tiles around the HVAC vent, which I’m not wild about but also think no one will notice or care about as the joints are half-obscured by the vent cover anyway.
Let’s all just send up thoughts and prayers that laying the tile goes much less dramatically tomorrow.
The Rookery 