I started with four of the short edge tiles (after concluding that I would have to cut the edge tiles of the other wall anyway) and the tiles that fit around the the existing pipes. There's some good news: these are wall tiles, and are made of a much lighter, more porous material, than the floor tiles. It's not softer, per se, but it is much easier to cut. I waited until 10:00 AM out of respect for the neighbors, and then did all my cutting, whipped up a fresh batch of thin-set and went to work. I was done by 1:30, which is also good news -- doing the bottom row is hard (mostly on the back), but it gets easier and easier as you move up the wall, and this is also one of those things you just get faster at with some experience. The tile cutting will be all simple straight lines now, which is also great. It's fast and not difficult to do. I notice particularly that applying the mortar and raking it with the trowel is just pretty fast and simple -- you just do the entire section you're hoping to cover, groove it and then prepare to get to work.
Here's two views of the day's work -- you'll notice that the leftmost "stack" of tiles is shorter (that wall is 3' 9"), so the tiles are about 8 ⅜" long to leave space for grout on one side and caulk on the other. Each of those has to be cut, but now I'm up to speed, and to cut one tile like that takes only about 2 minutes (taping it and marking the tape take up most of that time). I only did four at a time, because I want to make sure that if the space changes slightly as one goes up the wall (and it probably does!), that the tiles fit.
That's about 10 square feet done out of 45, so there's a fair bit of work to be done still! Even so, that means this wall will be finished tomorrow, and a second wall should be started.
As always, the colors are radically off in these photos. I did manage to take a nice picture of what the floor tiles actually look like:
As you can see, there's a medium blue with a hint of grey, a pretty neutral grey in the bottom left, and a lighter blue (with a hint of green), almost milky blue. Contrast that to the picture two above, where you see a dark navy, almost black, and pretty much just various shades of grey. The white tiles are also absolutely white, mirror white, like shiny frosting on a cookie white (the white glaze is a thin layer on top of a light tan, porous tile -- it really is rather like a frosted cookie).
check out the reflected tree line in the leftmost tile
They basically pick up whatever color is around them in photos, however, so here they look light blue. Again, just bright white in real life.
Two humorous stories. First, every single time I went outside, this red dragonfly was trying -- very frustrated -- to have sex with the bright red door. That was over like a three hour period, so he did not give up easily.
Second, I've been doing some thinking about safety, since I'm working with power tools and some fairly ordinary chemical mixes that are probably not great for you to be around too much (mortar, tile dust, etc.). When I first got the angle grinder, I wanted to know: what are the proper safety precautions? The guidebook tells you, and among other things it says that you must wear whatever-rated safety goggles that also cover the sides of the eyes and a full face visor like welders use and every person within 50 feet of you must do so as well. That's really, seriously what it says.
I watched a tile professional showing how to cut porcelain with an angle grinder, because I wanted to know if he used the special guard attachment for cutting blades which I didn't have. He did not. He in fact had removed the regular guard and was cutting with no guard at all. He also wasn't wearing gloves. Or any kind of eye protection at all. (I also checked lots of other videos, and no one uses the special cutting blade guard, which makes sense, since it would also make it almost impossible to cut tile).
Which all leads me to my one safety story so far, which happened on the first day I was cutting tiles. The angle grinder tells you to tighten down the cutting wheel with "a wrench." I was kind of baffled, because the thing you tighten is very narrow and perfectly round. Still I gave it a go with a plumber's wrench and got to work. After I'd cut a few tiles, I started to set the grinder down and the wheel began to wobble and, as it coasted to a stop, very gently fell off. This is a real problem, because those things spin at 10,000 rpm. It began to appear that you needed a special wrench to secure the cutting wheel (an angle grinder spanner), but after 20 or 30 web pages, I found out that, no, you need a hex wrench. I have a huge collection of hex wrenches, and pretty soon, I tightened it up for real, and it's been rock solid ever since. But I was still annoyed that DeWalt hadn't included one in the box; I looked several times. See?
Lift those cardboard flaps -- there's nothing inside that box except the screw-on handle. Unless you look at the underside of the flaps.
And there is the wrench you need. Nota bene, DeWalt, not "tighten with a wrench," but "tighten with the hex wrench included in your purchase and hidden somewhere inside the box."
That's all for today, folks. Happy 4th!
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