Tiling: Day 4 to Finish

Day 4 actually occurred just over two weeks ago. Here I am about to lay the last piece into place.

Day 5 was a week later when we found time to grout. Dominic and Manisha Salvaraj lended a couple hands to get us started. Apparently Manisha has been watching a lot of HGTV and wanting to try it for some time. It took us a good day to get it all in but here’s Sharon showing off the completed work.

The next couple of days inolved misting the floor occasionally with water and ended with a sealer application on the grout. That left us wth the final challenge: edging the carpet.

I really didn’t think this would be the hardest part of the job, but in retrospect it earned the award. I wanted to go with a straight transition from carpet to tile like all other intersections throughout the house, so I would at least need a z-bar (a metal strip to tuck the carpet under) to hold the carpet down along the edge of the tile. The z-bar would have to be attached with carpet tack strips to a cement subfloor… but how do you nail wood to cement?

One Home Depot consultant suggested — and as I first thought — “Don’t waste your time trying to nail it. Use mason screws.” Sounds good to me, but as I went to rent a hammer drill to predrill the holes I was met with a confounded look from yet another Home Depot expert. “I’ve been installing carpet for 3 years and I’ve always nailed strips to cement. You just need a solid hammer and hit it once straight on. You can do it!”, he says. So supplied with a bit of confidence I headed home, framing hammer in hand, to finish the job.

One hour later I was back at Home Depot to rent the hammer drill.

You would think at some point I would have recalled a hard-learned lesson I acquired from an earlier summer experience building pole-barns: I can’t hammer a nail to save my life. Every tack I struck ended up bent out of shape or flew across the room. The couple of times I did hit one straight on snapped the tack in half. This floor was not giving in to trivial misplaced poundings.

So it wasn’t much later that same evening before I found myself with a drill and a bent will to see this project to completion. After 10 minutes the first tack strip was in and I knew I was on my way. This sense of success however soon began to melt away after starting the holes for the second tack strip, for my drill bit was doing the same. The concrete floor had turned my mason bit into a ball of molten metal.

I was destroyed. I couldn’t continue. I accepted defeat.

Eighteen hours and $135 later a carpet installer arrived and finished the job. How did he do it? A hammer. Do I care? No. After all, he thought my tiling work was very professional and I will glady rest my tired rear on those laurels.