Monday, February 24, 2014

sprouts

It's only been three days and I already have - count em - SEVEN sprouts.


They grow up so fast *wipes misty eye*

Friday, February 21, 2014

planting seeds

I'm already a week behind schedule but my seeds are now planted. I've not had good luck with seeds before, but since this year I decided to plan everything out right I thought I'd give it another shot. To help me along, I bought this nifty little greenhouse contraption from Jiffy.


I put it together by putting the black plastic stacking piece on the bottom and then folding this felt-like sheet over it so both edges are touching the bottom. Then another plastic tray, this one with round holes in it, sits on top of the felt sheet. Inserted in each hole is a coin shaped piece of peet wrapped in very thin gardening material.  




After I put it together I filled the bottom area with 12 cups of warm water and waited while it was absorbed by the peet. I was hoping it would be like one of those magic expanding alien toys from when you were a kid that blimps up instantly, but this one took a lot longer (by a lot I mean probably 10 minutes). 




Some of them rose unevenlly and a couple didn't actually rise at all, so those I helped along by pouring water on top.




Then I pulled the material back a bit and planted some seeds. Here's how they're laid out:


I'm so excited so see them sprout! Riveting Friday night, I know.


Monday, February 17, 2014

Tiles!

After a day spent wasting time and money we were back at it, ready to finally lay some tile. We considered laying them vertically to go along with the grain of the wood floor but decided to lay them horizontally instead. This way the grout lines mirror the lines of the woodstove. Cool beans.



Once that was decided we followed some directions I found on the interwebz and measured and marked the middle point of the area we intended to tile. We started laying out our tiles with spacers to get a sense of how it would look.


It was fairly tedious but, boy - I'm really glad we did it. It was obvious that there would be an akward gap against the wall that would be too small to tile and too big to grout. As we thought about that my dad made the astute observation that people would really only see the first few rows of tiles, so why not start laying everything out based on those?



Brilliant! I had not even considered that because I was so nervous about messing anything up that I was just following "the rules." So we pulled everything off the floor and started laying them out all over again. Tedious, for sure.


We laid the tiles out so that some would edge up against the walls and others would need to be cut in half. This was pretty cool because we didn't need to do many complicated measurements - we could just cut a bunch of tiles in half at once.


To cut the tiles for this project I bought a manual tile cutter like this for about $20.00.





We made a few practice cuts and ocne we got the hang of it it was pretty easy. You just slide the cutter across the tile then press down and the device snaps it for you. The cutter was fine for this job because it involved a lot of small, straight cuts, but for anything more complicated you'd need a wet saw. I was already spending more on this project than I anticipated so I skipped buying or renting one this time.


Once we had all the pieces laid out and ready we started mixing the quick set. We added water to the mix and stirred it all up, following the directions on the packaging. I was nervous I didn't have the right consistency so we had to play around with it a bit.


When it was time to lay the first tile I just sat there holding the quick set  on the spreader thing saying "I'm so nervous! I'm so nervous!" But I took the plunge and laid some of those bad boys down. Like everything else it was really pretty easy once I got a feel for it. You have to work pretty fast so the quick set doesn't try on you, and the directions say don't mix more than you can lay within 20 minutes. We ended up needed to mix up a second batch ti finish laying all the tiles but that's ok - I welcomed the break.


 We stopped laying tile when we got up to the edge where some funkier cuts were required.



Where odd cuts were needed we laid tiles down and marked the required cuts with pencil.

 
 

Like a glove.



Turns out there were two trouble spots where more complex cuts were required than I could make on my simple tile cutter. Those spots needed 'L' shaped cuts. We tried to make them but just ended up breaking a bunch of tiles. Luckily some friends have a wet saw we could use so we can finish those areas up another day.


But for now, I'm pooped and covered in quick set. I leave you with this before and after:




Sunday, February 16, 2014

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