A tiling mess even without tile

Anybody who knows me well knows I already have a pretty solid repertoire of swear words and the last thing I need, suffering under the stress of this week, is another four-letter word to sprinkle into my conversations like red chilis on pizza. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to brag. I simply took to cussing as a natural. It was obvious that, even as a first-grader, my grasp of grammatically proper usage of cuss words in a variety of situations was advanced well beyond my peers’. We can all thank my dad for that. I’m sure my mother did. Imagine my surprise and deep hurt to discover from the grade school aptitude tests my special ability was not a valued skill set.

But I digress.

I simply need to explain all this because it’s crucial to my point today that I don’t really need another swear word to wield like a wrecking ball. I’m a bit of a purist and like to keep to a simple, basic set of cuss words without getting fancy, but the extreme stress I am under this week dealing with the latest stumbling block in the construction road to a new home has given me a new four-letter word.

Tile.

Four little letters. One little syllable. (And a minor dipthong for the word nerds reading this.) But the amount of time I’ve spent researching, reading on, watching installation videos about and, for the love of tile, searching for tile is unbelievably painful. 

My brain hurts. My animals, including my husband, are emotionally wounded from neglect. And did I mention that my brain hurts? The hours and hours I have put into this make it like an extra full-time job this week. And did I mention that I haven’t even picked a tile yet?

Oh yeah, this is a tiling mess, and I don’t even have tiling tile yet.

My husband and I went back and forth on whether to build a tile shower or install an easy, plunk-in-place shower stall, and had decided to go the quicker, cheaper route of putting in a shower insert. Then, I’ll be tiled, if my husband didn’t just unilaterally decide that we need to build a tile shower. I listened to his blah blah blah and agreed to agree. That was my first tiling mistake. 

And it has caused every tiling last one of my tiling headaches all week. The construction project is now committed to this tiling nightmare.

I cannot get back any of the tiling hours I have spent still searching for the right tile that I can tiling afford. At first I was just looking at tiles I liked. I had a plan that included a color scheme, it was a tiling thing of beauty. Then I tallied up the price, and it was high enough to give me tiling sticker shock.

Tile that, I thought, and now I’m working on a new plan. A cheaper plan. 

What a tile storm.

It has to be resolved this tiling weekend, and my biggest worry is that after spending all the money for materials and all the hours of sweat equity building it, the shower will look like tile. A big pile of tile. You know what I mean. And then the tiler will leak.

I swear, in the sense that I give you my oath, if this project is successful I will have a T-shirt made that says “I am tiling amazing.” 

You will know what I mean.

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What a tiled up situation at pam@viewfromthenorth 40.com.