A hot week's tiling

The tiles on the terrace (over the silo) are finally finished. It was very warm work, but working with cement, with grout, and buckets of water is a very effective exfoliant, so now I have nice clean hands. With nice clean blisters.

It was a good thing that I left the hump untiled until after I'd worked out how to tile it. In the end it only needed four easy cuts to produce a tiled area that is a couple of centimeters higher than the surrounding area. Like this (these are all clickable thumbnails - click on them for high-res pictures):



I was surprised to find that the grouting was such vigorous work, even though I didn't do much at a time. It was quite difficult to leave the grout long enough to dry sufficiently in the gaps between the tiles, but not so long as to be impossible to clean off the surface.



In the background is the man from the supermarket come to fix our 9-week-old washing machine (bearings shot). The grouting took me four days, though of course since it was so hot I wasn't exactly working full-time (though I do remember one evening when I finished at 8pm). In between I was getting the red car imported and legal and insured in France. I had to replace its shock-absorbers which passed an English MOT but failed the French one - where they actually test them. In the UK they just check to see that they are present and not obviously leaking.

But the finished result (of the tiling) does look pretty good (the car still looks shabby but with French number plates):



Of course most things look nice with pots of flowers and sunshine, and what's more the peaches over the terrace are ripe and ready to pick (and not wormy either, unlike the apples). It's possible to see a small puddle in the middle: I flooded it to see where the water stayed. There was a similar puddle before I started tiling, but I tell myself that this one is smaller. In any event the surface is now pretty certainly waterproof. If there's rainwater getting into the silo now it will only be through the walls.

And in the background of all three pictures you can just see the youngest grandson's nappies on the line: he's on his way home today, but right now he's having a swim.