July 4 -- better than plan -- yes? no?

Don't you just love it when things go better than planned ? If you read my blog below from this a.m. you would know that I was thinking of renting a truck -- well, thanks to Budget we now have 13 boxes of tiles, 20 bags of unmodified thinset mortar (goes on between the Ditra and the tile), 4 more bags of modified (goes on between the subfloor and the Ditra), and two bags of grout. 13 boxes (7 per) + 1 loose tile apparently weigh 850 pounds -- 9 1/4 pounds per tile, which comes to 4.11 pounds per square foot.

No, I shouldn't have started to write this blog ... or perhaps I should ... darn ... 92 tiles x 18"x18"/144" = 207 square feet. The room is 11'3" x 19'5" -- roughly 220 square feet -- they were supposed to deliver 240 square feet (with the cut tiles I needed 105 tiles). Darn. Darn. Darn. (&^%*^$*&^%*&))&$^%$@ .... you get the idea.

Well, I just called the tile place. Seems they were short shipped and didn't know it. Darn. Darn. Darn. I have to keep the blog clean. No telling who might be reading it. ....

So -- they have 15 loose tiles that they are going to send with Sandy -- who is in town right now returning the truck. They may be from a different dye lot -- we're not sure, but then again there is a 2'x11.5' closet at the end of the room -- if we cannot tell the difference, then who cares. These are the same tiles that I installed in the darkroom.

Back to my "good news" story. So the truck worked out well. I called Budget at 7:30 this morning and picked up the truck just before 10am. I carried just over 2000 pounds of stuff back here -- more mortar than I need at this point, but I'll need it later (and fewer tiles, but you've read that story already ...). It only took 3 loads with the ATC to get 8 bags of mortar and the 13 boxes of tiles down here -- 400 pounds of mortar was not a problem going downhill -- my worry is that it will get away from me, the trailer will break, the machine will start skidding ... and I brought 8 boxes of tile with the second load and 5 boxes in the third load.

It did not start out easy -- I loaded the mortar onto the trailer and Sandy noticed that the one tire was low -- well, by the time I started putting air into it the tire had broken seal with the rim along the back side. That took a while to fix with silicone sealant and the air compressor ... but I got back into business again.

This is going to take a lot of handling though -- but there is no way around it. I cannot drive the truck to the basement

1) load onto truck
2) offload truck into barn
3) load onto ATC
4) offload ATC to basement
5) install

It's actually worse than this because we loaded the mortar and tiles at the back of the van and I worked inside the van (bent over I might say) moving from the back of the van to distribute the weight. Of course then back at the cottage the process was reversed -- so add two more "handles". Sandy helped with the offloading in the barn -- she was up there staining her new bench for the laundry room. Of course I have other things that I want stained first ... but oh well, as long as it works out in the end.

I caught Sandy at the plumbing place -- she had just taken delivery of the toilet, faucet, and shower components -- I talked to Norm and he is getting the appropriate parts to bridge the gap between the toilet flange at the concrete floor level and the base of the tile which will be 1.75" higher due to the subfloor, Ditra and tile. Jason had some of the parts yesterday, but Norm can supply.

It is 4pm now -- too late to start anything major -- but I will spread out some of the tile downstairs to see how it will all work out. With the side-trip back to the tile place Sandy will be home around 6pm.