what a waste. what. a. waste.

I'm too n00b to embed videos properly, but this sums up my feelings perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WMHDe2qRQ

"before picture"

Like I mentioned, when we knocked out the tiles we found  that they were laid on sheet metal. In my pre-project research I had read something about using sheet metal under a woodstove to prevent fires from any stray embers that might come out. I couldn't remember where I read that, but since it was my first time doing a project like this I figured I had better follow that advice. Knowing nothing about sheet metal I called a few stores and ended up going to our local handyman store. We had to buy two sheets of metal to cover the area, and it was 24.. weight? thick? I forget the unit already. The cost of these two sheets of 24 whatever? Almost $60. Gulp.

So we brought the metal home and measured it into place. we marked our lines with a sharpie and cut them with tin sheers. It was a pretty easy process, until we started to nail the sheets down.

I had marked where the nails should go (one center, one at each corner) in an attempt to minimize nails and holes so that the tile would sit on it as flat as possible. Thinking this now it sounds totally stupid, but at the time it made perfect sense to me. Anyway, we started hammering in the nails and... started bending them. Like, all of them. Obviously we're not professionals but I'm also not new to nailing things so I found this to be very surprising and frustrating.

We ruined probably 100 nails and made a ton of extra holes, but about an hour later the sheets were in place. Then we thought about laying tiles, but something seemed... wrong. The metal was just so shiny and smooth, it seemed impossible that anything could even stick to it. Then we remembered this weird netting stuff that we pulled up in the demo. It was kind of like fishnet and we thought maybe it had been used to make sure everything held together on the metal.

you can kind-of-almost see a picture of the netting at the bottom center-right

So we were back online, looking for anything we could find about tiling on top of sheet metal. Our results? Nothing. Well, nothing except a few bits of information saying things like "you cannot tile over sheet metal." UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHH.

But then we were confused. Clearly you CAN tile over sheet metal because we just tore some up after it had held well for 20+ years. And what about fires? Heads spinning, we went to the hardware store to ask someone in person. We met a dude working there and his first impression was no way jose. That is a quote. (Not really). But he was very interested in our plight and asked a ton of weird and extraneous questions, and her drew a diagram of the area about 30 times. Ultimately though, he came to the same conclusion: no. (His co-worker agreed.)  Actually, what they really said was that they had never heard of anything so peposterous, and thought it was a totally crazy idea. They also said that the metal wouldn't help prevent fires because it's literally buried under inches of other fire proof materials, so if anything was so hot that it burned through that stuff then entire house would probably already be gone before the sheet metal had a chance to do anything. Comforting. Also, they didn't sell the mesh stuff we thought might help.

Disapointed and still just a bit unsure, we returned home and ripped up all the sheet metal. The sheet metal that set up back about $60 and we had wasted hours putting down. We were not happy campers. And the results after a day's worth of work? It looks almost exactly as it did before we started. Boo.

remember this before shot?

it looks a lot like this after shot. 

that is one expensive pile of garbage