The Fight

Professional tilesetters, we salute you. Tiling is HARD. Fortunate to be gifted with leftover gray tiles from Dominic’s dad and stepmom’s remodeling project (note: it’s a good strategy if your low budget renovation coincides with the higher end renovation of a loved one), we loved the look of tile and were eager to begin tiling the shower. We didn’t quite have enough tiles, but it was fun to add accent tiles (we used white and these beautiful, iridescent, blue-green glass tiles) in a random pattern. It all looked so easy when we laid out the pattern on the bedroom floor. However, it was considerably less fun once the tiling actually began.

Tiling our shower was very geometric and very unforgiving, and also led to the only real fight of our home improvement project. When we returned to the house for a second, arduous day of tiling, we found that the oozing mortar that we had failed to properly clean off the wall had hardened, necessitating a round of drilling before we continued to tile. It was around this time that Dominic began grumbling that he hadn’t wanted to tile the shower in the first place, and I responded by growling that those comments were very useful halfway through the tiling project. I stormed off, and a few minutes later Dominic found me eating cookies on the front porch. We decided we were done for the day even if the tiles weren’t done. Over the next few days we returned with renewed energy, and completed the tiling and grouting. One of Dominic’s sisters commented that the alignment (or lack thereof) gives one sort of a feeling of being on a boat, and Dominic vowed never to tile again, but it was done, it looked pretty good, and we were still speaking to each other.