Make America grout again

A *very* long day, but not altogether bad. Bright and early I was up fashioning the transition strip that will take you from the remaining linoleum to the new tile. Transition strips are super important, because without them, people will strep on the edge of the tile, and over time, it will crack and break. I've done lots of them before, but this was has to fit in a doorway with a closing door, so it required very exact shaping. You start with an appropriately shaped transition strip, and then cut it to the right length. But because door posts are "sculpted," you need to make it match.

And in a crazy moment, never to be repeated, I got it approximately correct on the first try. But you can still see some of the orange DITRA underneath. This was expected; I'd looked at it before, and I new I'd need another strip underneath it to support it.

In the meantime, I stained the wood to match the rest of the wood in the house:

Put a secondary transition strip down, and then added the new, stained version with caulk to seal it in place, and allow it to "float" over the tile. If you step on this, it transfers your weight equally across the whole border, and nothing breaks.

And we had some remarkably close "cherry putty" that I was able to use to fill in the gaps. I have to say, it's such a close match that it really looks like it's a perfect cut. But all of this is small potatoes, and what we want is the big potatoes. Did I get everything done that I wanted to today? No. Did I get the most important thing done. Yes, I did. Remember where we last left off, with the bathroom tiled. Today, I cleaned everything up first, so I'd have an idea what it would all look like.

Then I began to grout. And grout. And grout again. Check it out (admittedly, I am doing literally everything wrong in this video clip -- you moisten the whole area with a sponge first, then put the grout on the float, then press that in diagonally, then at a 90° angle, then clean with sponge, then again with cloth, then again with paper towel...):

And it looks pretty good when it's all grouted. Then, tragedy struck. I ran out of grout with one wall left to go -- this is not only a problem for staying on schedule (psychologically important to me because OCD -- I literally scraped up little bits of grout that had fallen on the floor so the north wall could be *completely* finished before I left), but also a problem of consistency -- I wanted all the same grout so that everything would match. I dashed off to Home Depot to pick up a second container of "bright white Fusion Pro unsanded grout." They have dozens of containers of that brand, but they happened to be out of one color. Which one could it be?

Note conspicuous gap to left of FusionPro™ canisters

Fuck them. There are dozens of perfectly good substitutes that are exactly the same color, and in fact the one I picked up was also *hugely* easier to work with. In the end, I got everything grouted by 6:20 PM or so.

At that point, I'd been bathroom working since about 8 AM. Time to call a halt, so around 7:00 I was done cleaning and onto making dinner. 

Tomorrow's schedule is now slightly off, because I need to primer, paint and seal, but it's doable.