#$%&@!

We've been busy for the past week or so ramping up for our return to remodeling. Our master bathroom is still not complete, and that is our highest priority for getting done this summer. The new window is in, the walls are up and painted, but our current roadblock is the floor, which we plan to tile.

We've had a few problems tiling the floor. We had troubles finding the materials we needed, then had to figure out how to deal with an unlevel floor, and then discovered the self-leveling compound we used didn't self level (twice). Back in January we finally hired a concrete contractor to come in and level the floor for us, and had been waiting for the summer to do the tiling. Of course all of this would have been much easier if our original contractor hadn't walked off the job on us, but we'll ignore that.

This afternoon it was to begin. We were going to embed our crack-isolation membrane in thinset, and then tomorrow it was time to lay the tile. We had all the materials purchased, had read all the instructions we could find, had our layout ready, and had a tile saw rental arranged. The floor was swept as clean as it possibly could be. The adjoining room was ready to handle tiling mess. Our plumber was scheduled to come in next Wednesday to install the toilet. We were nervous, but excited. Within a week we would, if all went well, have a functioning bathroom.

Then, as we were testing our tile placement, we discovered that sections of the concrete our contractor had used to level the floor were no longer attached to the concrete underneath. They sounded hollow when tapped, and we could easily push on certain areas of the floor to widen or narrow cracks.

Our current opinions on this matter are not fit to publish.

[Update July 22: Our concrete contractor stopped by today and reported that he could likely fix the problem, but he wouldn't have time to do it for at least a week.]

Categories:

• remodeling
• house