Any guesses as to what the tiler said as he left yesterday afternoon? Yup, don’t walk on the tiles. So naturally I did. But I had a good excuse M’Lud. See part of the roof in the room-with-no- name is made up of this plastic stuff which they make conservatory roofs from. Mostly see-through but prone to warming up and cooling down, and flexing in the process. When you use silicone gunk to seal the edge as per previous builder when he installed it, it eventually works loose. Simple equation, loose roof + torrential rain = wet floor. So my extenuating circumstances were that I didn’t figure a newly tiled, ungrouted floor should get wet so I crossed over to the other side and retrieved a bucket from the garage to be strategically placed.

Now as anyone who has had tiling done knows, there is a thin film of dust left where the tile has been wiped to remove excess cement and treading on this leaves footprints. So when tiler appears today to finish off cementing tiles he knows. I suppose I could have wiped the floor to remove evidence, but that would kinda give the game away. Having done some tiling in a previous life as a general maintenance guy, I knew that there was no real danger since the cement would have dried by this morning and I only stepped in the middle, but still got a mild rebuke. Not sure what he will say tomorrow when he sees the wife’s footprints added from when she went out to refill the bird feeders, maybe I’ll arrange to be busy when he arrives. Having cast and tiled a concrete step outside the backdoor, I get brownie points from the tiler as it is apparently a good job, so I may invoke the fellowship of the tile if things turn nasty. Incidentally, if you haven’t created anything from concrete and want to, you can find out all you need to know and soooo much more from Google. I look on it as a mark of how far our civilisation has progressed.

So by Friday we should have a tiled and grouted room-with-no-name and my considerable experience with a paintbrush will be called upon. We have decided it will be minimalist. Actually we decided to do it all in white since we couldn’t come up with a better idea, but that’s the same as being minimalist anyway.