It's a Wash!

We have spent the last three days working on completing the laundry room.  Rick lamented to me today, "You know, that's the only thing we have done this year."  I looked at him to see if his brain had totally drained out of his left ear.

"Yeah, that's right," I said. "Think about it: we have built a total addition onto this house.  I think that is pretty good progress in the past eight weeks!"  He admitted, once I put it that way, that what I said was true.

Our race into the home stretch started on Sunday when we put up the bullnose baseboard around the room.  The south wall gave us a little trouble because of a false panel that we needed to put in to access the plumbing, but Rick solved that by moving the panel up just a bit so the full bullnose tile fit in place. He did a great job of being very careful with the thin-set, so clean-up afterward was at a minimum.

Spacers keep the bullnose in line as the "baseboard" goes
into the laundry room.

Grouting of the bullnose came on Monday, and then it was just a matter of waiting for everything to dry.  I know that if we had had the tile professionally done, they would have put down the tile and grouted it all in the same day.  Nowhere (online or on the packages themselves) does it say that the thin-set and the grout should go down on the same day.  The tile should set for at least 24 hours to dry before the grout is added, so I actually am glad that we did this job ourselves, even though we were unsure about the outcome.  Is it professionally perfect?  No, but is there such a thing as any job being professionally perfect?

The completed room, bullnose and all!

Yesterday afternoon, as we were waiting for the grout to dry, we ventured out to look for tile for the front porch.  We thought that we had found some good tile at Home Depot, but when we went to get the bullnose to match, we found that the bullnose was far FROM a match.  The tile looked almost brown, and the bullnose was decidedly gray.  We learned that people can go to Home Depot to get matched sets of tiles from the same dye lots, but the bullnose had no dye-lot numbers stamped on the boxes anywhere.  So we started our search by taking the bullnose back to Home Depot for a refund, and then we were off to ProSource to see what they might have in outdoor, non-slip tile.

Keith waited on us again, and he showed us a variety of possibilities.  Once again, we ended up with a DalTile, this one called Egyptian Beige.  The tile has a rough texture and we were able to get it in 13 x 13 tile that will not overwhelm our 5 x 7 foot porch.  The great thing about ProSource is that they will assure us that all of the tile and bullnose come from the same dye lot, so it will all match.  The DalTile is made in the United States instead of China, (yes!) and it is much thicker than what we were going to get from Home Depot.  That, also, is reassuring that this tile will last as long as we will own the house.  We took along a sample of the yellow paint that we want to use on the house next year, so for now everything will coordinate well.  Earlier we had somewhat selected some pavers for the new front side walk, but now that we have changed tile, we will have to wait until the Egyptian Beige comes in to see if the pavers will work with that.  The samples from the paver company were free, so we are not out any money at this point.

 One of the things I have tried to do this week in my "down time" is to  take the warp I counted out for my loom and actually put it ON the loom.  Generally dressing the loom is not my most favorite activity, and it has truthfully been years since I last warped the loom.  As I got into this one, I found out that I should have bought one more lease stick to help the yarn get on the back beam, and I should have let Rick do the actual threading of the yarn through the reed.  As it is, I am slowly making progress on the warping job, and I am determined not to let this beat me.  Rick is a naysayer, telling me that the fabric I propose to weave will not work, so we shall see...

My half-warped loom.  This is NOT the usual way to do this,
but I am short a little equipment, so this is improvised.

As we were looking at the laundry room yesterday afternoon, I made another discovery.  I closed the pocket door just to see how the room looked with the door closed, and I learned that the door did not clear the top of the bullnose.  Oh, oh.  Neither of us had thought of that, but the bullnose prevented the door from closing by at least a quarter inch.  Darn!  Rick's solution?  If we cannot adjust the tile, then we must adjust the door.  His orbital sander and a few moments resulted in a curved door bottom corner that allows the door to close.  The great part is that no one notices the missing corner of the door because it is in the wall when opened, and hidden by kitchen baseboard when closed.  (He's so smart.)

Rick "adjusts" the corner of the door to clear the bullnose
tile so the door closes completely.

This morning while I stayed home to clean the house before the Board of Health closed us down, Rick ran to Home Depot to get the sealer for the grout.  He put that on as soon as he got home so that it would have time to dry before Steve and Chris came over to help us move the washer and dryer back into the laundry room.  A big THANK YOU to Steve who helped muscle the washer and dryer back into place and then painstakingly stayed to help Rick get them both level.  Short of a hurricane taking off the roof and sucking them up, those two machines are not moving.  Rick also hooked up my utility sink, so the wonderful sound of laundry spinning in the washer serenades me as I write this.

It's a wash... and a load in the dryer in the wonderfully
balanced machines back in the new laundry room.

While the twerpy little tune that the washer and dryer play to signal the end of the cycle generally irritates me, I have to admit that after going without laundry facilities for the past two weeks, they have a particularly sweet sound right now.