The Good, the Bad, and the Definitely Ugly

For the past two days, the tile setters have been in our house transforming bare walls into a workable shower.  We are both glad that the job is almost complete.

Our tile setter was a man named Andy who grew up in East Berlin. He has worked his trade for many years.  He told us today that he grew up in a house right next to the Wall that separated east from west Berlin.  He said that he would sometimes look out the upper windows of the house and he could see the houses on the other side of the Wall.  He played on it as a child, he admitted, never really understanding what it was all about. The Wall did not come down until he was a grown man, but because Germany was eventually unified, he was able to come to America.

His helper was a very nice young man named Joel who was constantly on the go either mixing thin-set or cutting tiles to Andy's specifications. They worked for the last two days from 8:30 in the morning until about 2:00 in the afternoon.  The first day they finished about 2/3 of the shower stall, stopping for the day as they ran out of thin-set mix.

Green spacers help to keep the heavy tile from
sliding down onto one another while the thin-set
dries.

Although the tile are gorgeous, they are perhaps too large (12 x 24") for the area. Their size resulted in a couple of awkward cuts at the end of the rows, and since each tile weighs 8 pounds, Andy had to use a lot of thin-set, applied with a 1/2" trowel, for them to adhere to the wall.  The job may have looked simple, but it certainly was not.

Last night neither of us was completely thrilled with the results.  We knew that a small line of tile would have to be cut at the top, and that worried us.  We also were not happy with a couple of other small details, but we tried to reserve judgement until today.

Today they finished the rest of the tile, and they will be back tomorrow to grout the entire structure.  Andy tried to address some of our concerns, and when he cut a tile wrong and then laid the entire row, Rick asked him to remove it and to do it correctly.  He did so without saying anything although I am sure that he was not too happy with us.

While Andy and Joel worked on the shower, Rick and I went outside to remove a tree stump that literally was in the way of our new fence.  This tree, another hated Brazilian Pepper tree, grew up in the middle of the old wire fence that our neighbor removed.  A close look at the remaining stump shows three different places were the fence had to be cut away because the fence grew around and through it.  We had cut down most of the tree when we came down for a week in September, and Mark, our neighbor, had cut away the rest of the fence while we were gone.

We tackled the remaining stump today.  While it took a little digging and a little persuasion with a SawsAll, the stump is now history.  We really hope that we do not have to put in a fence post at that exact location, because if we do, we will have many more underground roots to remove.

Sadly, this is the first of many stumps that we will have to
remove from the fence line in our back yard.

I suppose we find it easy to be critical about the shower since we are not doing the work ourselves.  A couple of the floor tile don't have much space for the grout tomorrow, and a couple are spaced a bit far from the edge and will require more grout than we would like to see; however, not much can be done about that now.  The grout we chose is almost the same color as the tile.  Rather than differentiate them one from another, we decided to use a similar hue to blend the tiles together.  We hope that some of the gaps or lack thereof will fade from sight with the grout in place.

Do we like the shower?  Yes, we do. However, we both are a little disappointed in some of the details. Overall, this shower is far better than what we had before, and in the end I think it will look very nice and will serve us well for many years to come.  As Rick said, we like to do things by ourselves.  That way if we do something wrong or mess up a detail, we have the power and the ability to fix it, and if we decide to let an error ride, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

The marble threshold and the floor tile all
help the shower look more complete.

Speaking of blame, I take full credit today for the world's ugliest pie.  I found a recipe a few days ago for an apple-cranberry pie.  It seemed simple to make and the ingredients sounded good, so I thought I would give it a try.  But first, I needed a pie pan.  The only dish I had in Florida was a quiche pan, and that was too deep for a pie.  While Rick was at the store yesterday, I told him to buy a pie pan.  He came home with the only one on the shelf.  It is big, deep, and probably has the same capacity to hold whatever I could fit into my quiche pan.

Since the pie pan was huge, when I put in the Pillsbury pie crust, it sunk to the bottom of the pan with nothing left to drape over the top.  I know, I know.  I should make my own pie crusts so I could roll them out to whatever size I need.  Sadly, I am far from a good pie crust maker.  Shoe leather is probably more tender and flaky than my home-made pie crusts.

The world's ugliest pie was not much better on the inside.

At any rate, I peeled six apples, cleaned an entire bag of cranberries, and followed the recipe by layering apples, cranberries, and a flour/sugar mixture into the plate three times over.  I thought it rather odd that there was no cornstarch to thicken the juices but then thought that perhaps the flour would do the trick.

I tucked in the top crust of the pie (since there was no bottom crust lip under which to tuck the top crust,) and then popped it into the oven.  It smelled delicious as it baked, even though it was, indeed, an ugly-looking pie.

After lunch, Rick tried a piece.  Disaster!  The crust was great, but the inside was a combination of baked apples and cranberries, all swimming for their lives in a sea of pink liquid.  Apparently, my hope that the flour would have thickened the juices was dead wrong.   He ate the crust and some of the apples, but he did not like that the cranberries were whole, so he threw them out.

I tried a piece after dinner tonight.  While the taste was not bad, the running texture of the insides was far from appetizing.  I am 60 years old, and for the first time in my life, I threw over half of a pie into the garbage can.  My apple/ cranberry pie recipe is definitely not a keeper! Now that I know what I have to deal with concerning my new pie plate, I will work on making the crust look better, and I certainly will rely on my old favorites as far as the filling is concerned.

Today started with doubts about the shower and with optimism about the sweet-smelling pie.  It ended with satisfaction with the shower and rejection of the world's ugliest pie.  You win some, and you lose some.  I am glad that we are far happier about the shower than we were with dessert.