847 Years of Bad Luck

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

...Who's going to rescue us if you fall?

We have two gigantic mirrors in the downstairs dining room. We never liked them much, but they were so big and awkward we didn't know how to remove them. That all changed on Saturday.

Kathy had stripped all the wallpaper from this room -- all except for the space behind the two mirrors. We'd arrived at the moment of truth: it's either us or the mirrors.

These aren't just any little vanity mirrors, either. They're each more than 7 feet high and almost 4 feet wide. Bigger than a big person. They reach to well above your head and they're fixed to the wall with no obvious brackets or holders, which means they're probably glued directly to the wall. We'll have no idea how to get them off until we start prying on them.

I'll be honest; I'm afraid of them. Getting my fingers behind a giant mirror and pulling? That's just begging for a Faces of Death-style grisly demise. Imagine 7 feet of jagged mirror shards raining down on your head, under foot, in your eyes... Just thinking about it gave me the willies.

Fortunately, Kathy is made of sterner stuff. We covered the mirrors in plastic sheets in case the glass exploded outward. Here's Kathy taping up one sheet. Note that she's standing on a ladder in this photo. I told you the mirrors were tall. Then we put on goggles, heavy gloves, long sweaters, and heavy shoes. And then... pulled.

Lucky for us, the adhesive on the first mirror was pretty old and came away easily from the wall. (Which begs the question: if we hadn't removed the mirror when we did, how much longer would it have stayed there on its own?) Once it was loose, we had to set it down -- gently -- without scratching the floor. Kathy had wadded up more plastic sheeting, so this went pretty much as planned.

Okay, now to get it out of the room and out of the house. We opened up all the back doors and carefully, gently, slowly tipped the mirror over on one side so that we're carrying it horizontally instead of vertically. (That is, it's now 7 feet long and only 4 feet high.) The thing must weigh 50-70 pounds. It's surprisingly heavy. As we pass through each door I imagine accidentally banging it against the door frame, or catching a piece of furniture, or losing my grip and -- BAM! -- the mirror grenades into a million pieces, throwing reflective shrapnel throughout the house.

Out in the backyard, we lay it flat on the ground, where we've placed a big tarp. Another tarp goes on top of it, and then we get to the fun part: breaking the mirror. Kathy grabs a brick, stands back to what we hope is a safe distance, and lobs the brick directly at the mirror.

It bounces. No lie, a freakin' brick bounced off that stupid mirror. Hmm. Now what? I take my turn, and this time we put a few cracks in it. Several bricks later, and we've finally shattered the thing into poodle-sized pieces. I'm sure the neighbors were horrified by the noise. It sounded like the worst restaurant accident imaginable. We're bulls in a china shop.

The second mirror didn't come off the wall as easily. We had to really wrench at this one, which made me wince and squirm a little bit. Finally it pops loose, drops to the floor, and gets taken outside like its twin. We're getting good at lobbing bricks so it comes apart pretty swiftly.

So... what do you do with 150 pounds of fatally jagged broken mirror? By no coincidence, tomorrow is "super garbage" day, where the local waste-management company will take up to seven bins of anything you've got. We doled out the shards among three garbage cans and filled the rest with Styrofoam, newspapers, and other light items. They go to the curb tonight.

I hope we don't see any bloody, mangled garbageman corpses in the morning.

17,119 Tiles

In case you're wondering, there are exactly 17,119 tiles on the new bathroom floor. We've filled in all the little edges and corners, usually by gluing in tiles one by one. It's surprisingly hard to keep those little guys straight. Good thing most of them came on 12x12 sheets.

More Tile, Part II

Almost done now.

It's the end of Day 2 and we've laid almost all the tile except for the row in front of the door and the little oddball pieces around the edges. And we're pretty happy with how it's coming out.

The mesh backing on these tiles is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, putting down a sheet of 144 tiles at a time is a whole lot easier than gluing down each little coin individually. But on the other hand, the mesh backing doesn't stay square. Each one twists and stretches just a little bit, so they don't want to stay lined up.The farther you get from your starting point, the more out-of-whack they want to get. Normal square tiles don't have that problem.

Consequently, we've snapped a whole grid of chalk lines all over the floor, over and across, and we try to line up to those. So far it's working pretty well, but we've had to coax some of the sheets a little bit.

You can just see the gray heating mat at the very bottom of this photo. This is the same sort of floor heater we've got in the 2nd-floor bathroom. We like that one so much we put a similar one in here. It's the only source of heat in this room, and it'll be on a programmable thermostat so that we can set it to warm up in the morning and maybe for a little bit in the evening, too.

Meanwhile...

Maybe we have short attention spans. Maybe we're just masochists. Maybe it's both.

At the same time that Kathy and I are beating ourselves up tiling the 3rd-floor bathroom, Kathy's also downstairs stripping the wallpaper off the ground-floor dining room. Just thinking of the two flights of stairs in between those makes me tired.

Anyway, she decided the "bordello red" wallpaper had to go. Actually, the wallpaper itself isn't red; it's a floral pattern that's been painted over, as you can kind of see here. It isn't original, either; we think it was probably applied by the Leitzingers, who ran a restaurant here in the 1990s. Then someone else (perhaps Robert Kincaid?) painted over it. At any rate, all three ground-floor rooms are the same shade of red, and we're tired of it.

Kathy's got a two-step process: she soaks the painted wallpaper and strips it off with a kitchen spatula, then she soaks the wall again and strips off the adhesive backing paper. It would be great if the wallpaper came off in huge strips, but alas, it tears off in little confetti-like pieces. Kathy is a patient woman.

Now that the walls are almost completely bare, the room doesn't seem so dark. It's also exposed the underlying plaster, which is in surprisingly good shape. For being 120 years old, it's only got a few small cracks and holes, but nothing major.

The bare plaster, peeling wallpaper, and slightly damp smell also give the room a kind of dilapidated, haunted house feeling to it. If the whole house had looked like this two years ago, I'm not sure we would have moved in. But knowing this is temporary and that we'll have a cleaner, brighter room soon make it worthwhile. Especially since I'm not doing the work!

The End Is In Sight

Here's Kathy. Kathy is tiling our bathroom floor.

Kathy is busy. Busy, busy Kathy. She's spent the day hunched over, her knees on the hard floor. She's surrounded by the tools of her trade: bucket of water, straightedge, knife, trowel, rags, sponge, and tiles. Lots and lots of little bitty tiles.

As you can see here, we started laying tile from the far side of the room, working our way backward toward the door. Apart from just being good practice, it also avoids the horribly embarrassing mistake of tiling yourself into a corner. We'd look pretty stupid curled up under the window mewling for help.

At this point we're about one-third of the way done, and about ready to quit for the day. We'll finish the room tomorrow, except for the little fiddly bits around the edges. Those can wait another day or so.

We've gone with an old-fashioned black and white tile, as you can see. Each tile is 3/4-inch across, or about the size of a nickel. Thankfully, we don't have to put them down individually. They come in sheets of 144 little coins, so each sheet is about 10x11 inches. We're thinking about 120 sheets (17,280 tiles) ought to do it.

How To Tile a Bathroom Floor

The right way:

1. Hire a tile crew
2. Sit back and drink iced tea
3. Pay the nice people when they leave.

The way Kathy and Jim do it:

1. Buy some Sunset how-to books*
2. Make several trips to tiles stores and Home Deport
3. Wait for hot weather
4. Kneel on the floor for 10-12 days
5. Get clothes dirty 
6. Make several more trips
7. Groan about aches and pains
8. Admire handiwork

 *Sunset Publishing Co.: "The triumph of ambition over incompetence, for over 50 years."

I'll get straight to the chase: Kathy and I spent the last two days tiling our upstairs bathroom, and it looks pretty darned good. If you ever want to do this kind of thing yourself, here's what we learned.

The first step was to make sure the underlying redwood was in solid condition, and it was. We had to scrape off a lot of old adhesive and goo from the previous carpet (and the tile before that), but eventually it was flat and clean.

Next, you want to eliminate all the squeaks. Bounce around the room in your socks looking for squeaky floorboards and screw 'em all down. You can sometimes sprinkle talcum powder between the boards to silence squeaks, but that's just a temporary fix. You really want to drive long screws through the floor and down into the joists. That means finding the joists, which can be tricky. But if you're covering up the floor with tile anyway, you can drill all the holes you want until you find the right spacing.

When the floor is solid and silent, put down Hardie Backer cement board with a combination of adhesive (mastic) and more screws. Hardie makes special screws for this (naturally) with heads that lie flat and won't split the backer board. Don't worry about butting the boards right up next to each other. You're just supporting the tile to come, not making a pretty floor. Small gaps between seams don't matter. Tape over the seams with mesh tape and more mastic.

Now you're ready to lay tile. Or are you? What you don't want to do is starting laying your tile along the edge of the room, working toward the opposite wall. I know that seems logical, but it's wrong. You'll wind up with a roomful of slightly out-of-kilter tile and wonder why.

What you really want to do is measure the entire room very accurately. Don't round off the numbers or assume that two walls are the same. Measure everything and measure it exactly. If a wall is 68 and 7/8" then write that down; don't round up to 69 inches. Mark all the dimensions down in a notebook, paying special attention to small obstacles like plumbing, outlets, uneven studs, or whatever.

Also don't assume that your walls meet at right angles (ours certainly don't). Dust off your old high school geometry texts and relearn how to find an angle. Measure the four walls, then draw diagonals from the corners to the opposite corners and measure those. Are they the same? If they are, you're square. If not, you'll have to accommodate the out-of-square room when you start laying tile. (You'll also know where the exact center of your room is.)

Our room gets slightly narrower at one end. You can't see it, but the measuring tape says it's definitely there. That means we had to align the tiles in such a way that you won't see them "creeping" away from one wall or toward another. The tile should always look straight, even if the room isn't.

The best way to accomplish this is to pretend you're going to start laying tile from the door, but actually start laying it from the opposite side of the room, working toward the door. In other words, the doorway is the most important spot and should look the best, so start your measurements from there. You want full, uncut tiles in the doorway because that's the first thing everyone will see. But you actually want to lay the tile starting from the far side of the room, and that means taking very careful measurements so that when you finish, you wind up with perfect, uncut, straight tiles right in front of the door. Easier said than done, I know.

Decide which direction is perpendicular to your doorway and snap a straight chalk line along that dimension, which may not be exactly parallel to any of the side walls. This line will be your starting point. It might be near one of the walls, or it might be right down the middle of the room; it doesn't matter. What matters is that you believe it, trust in it, and respect it. That line is your beacon, your guide. You're going to line up your tiles to that line, not to the walls. Measure as many times as you have to until you can completely trust your chalk line.

Now you can start getting dirty. Smear thinset and trowel it out as thick as the tile maker says. Generally, the bigger the tiles the thicker you want your thinset. Always trowel your grooves in the same direction; don't make swirly patterns. This allows the goop to spread evenly and avoids trapping air bubbles. It's also good discipline. Think of it as a Zen rock garden.

By the way, trowels are right-handed. It's a nuisance to hold a trowel in your left hand, but it's just one of the crosses we bear. (sigh)