Cutting Tiles
Posted: Fri 14 November, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work 5 Comments »As I’ve said before, Herself has taken this week off work as annual leave. One of her main goals during this week has been to do the tiling of the final bedroom floor – we did the floors of the other two bedrooms before we moved in, as well as the living room, and didn’t expect to use the third bedroom for a while, so we didn’t do the tiling there.
Of course, plans then changed, and the second bedroom (which we initially were using) became the office, and so we set ourselves up in the main bedroom with the untiled floor. And so it’s been ever since. Tiling the floor has always been in the plan, it’s just that while we’ve been using it, well, the tiling hasn’t happened.
So earlier this week, Herself did all the floor tiles that didn’t need any cutting – the great majority of the work – and we hired an industrial tile-cutter to do the cuts. The tiles, as I may’ve said before, are 10mm thick fully-vitrified ceramic floor tiles – in other words, they’re tough as fuck, and a normal tile-cutter doesn’t even scratch the things. So instead we have to hire the industrial variety with a water-cooled rotating blade – like a bloody big angle-grinder – in order to do the work.
And that’s fine – except when it turns out that the blade supplied with the cutter is, to be polite, blunt as fuck. (That’s far politer than what I was calling it last night)
Amazingly, I only broke two or three tiles with the bloody thing. It was jamming up three or four times per tile, needing to be reversed, or lifted, or pulled out, or sworn at – or all of the above, of course. So all told, the cutting of the (approximately) twenty tiles took nearly three hours, lots of swearing, and me getting piss-wet through (due to the water-cooling of the blade, which is basically just a pumped spray of water) and effing cold. Mid-November is emphatically not the time to be doing tile-cutting in an open garage.
Still, it’s done now – there’s only one more room that’ll need tiling at some point, and that’s the kitchen. But we need to decide what we’re doing in there first, so that won’t be ’til at least the middle of next year. The bedroom looks fantastic, even before the grouting of the tiles is completed, and it’ll make a big difference to the house.
Even better, it means we might be able to go back to sleeping in there tonight, once I/we’ve reassembled the bed, and moved the furniture back in…
If I’d paid *that* much to hire the thing I’d have made them replace the blade! I’d certainly tell them how many tiles it caused you to break and expect them to knock that cost off the hire cost.
Incidentally, Aldis often have that sort in their specials for about forty quid. We bought one 7 or 8 years ago and it’s been totally invaluable for all sorts of things. Not on a bench, but, a Workmate is a good investment if you haven’t got one.
Now you just need to make some rag rugs to complete the effect 🙂 (start keeping old t-shirts for the purpose now…)
Oh, we’re certainly aiming for a discount, due to being supplied with shitty goods.
Yes, they should’ve replaced the blade – but we only had it for two days, and didn’t use it the first night, so didn’t know it was blunter than a very blunt thing ’til 5.30 last night, at which point it was too effing late.
Still, job done now.
Well, we got a 50% refund from HSS, where we’d hired it from.
Can’t complain…
Blue Star 🙂
(an erstwhile blogger, of my close acquainanace, would tell you that these are more valuable than gold bullion ;)))