It is done! No applause yet as there is still cleanup and put back together left to do. Mr Experience finished the grout today and I laid the last of the tile under the sink today. We wanted to make it neat and clean and there were some old holes in the floor that I had stuffed with steel wool and plastic bags to keep the mice out and the heat in. Sealing up the floor of this compartment fixes all those problems and makes it look better and easier to clean. A total win all around. We put most of the tools away and went to go work on one of my mom’s rentals. This is good as the grout now needs to rest for 72 hours before we can do the final cleanup on it.

I will need to wash the kitchen walls behind the fridge and the built in shelves made out of old doors. We will have to trim the doors to get them to fit. I had holes cut in them for the light switch and the outlet and now that we have changed the floor height they will need to be trimmed, that will happen on Friday or Saturday. The border collies will have to sleep in the laundry room tonight as the hallway grout got touched up again today and it needs to dry.

We want to save up for the wooden trim and do the whole house at once. We talked about this today and depending on our sheep buyer we may have the money much sooner than the end of the year. Annmarie will know in a few weeks.

We are incredibly happy with how the floors have turned out. It totally changes the appearance of our entire downstairs. Now we are picking new paint colors for downstairs. Hopefully we can have the entire downstairs painted in the next six weeks also. If only I could come up with the trim money in the next six weeks, Annmarie?

Well it is nearing the end finally, there will be just enough time to finish everything. I went over to Hermiston to pickup the needed tile to finish the job. They gave me credit for the 5 miscolored tiles. While I did this Mr Experience was grouting the portion of the kitchen we had done yesterday. I took Gizmo with me for the road trip. He is starting to settle down much faster but still won’t take a dog treat from the coffee place. He just does not eat it. I tossed it to Zeke when we got home, he wolfed it down asap. We had two different packages dropped off and Mr Experience said both delivery drivers were scared to open the gate. They kept looking at it like they were going to get shocked. The tightened wire sings like there is electricity in it and they think they will get shocked! So far it is working to keep Zeke in also and that is the important part.

We opened the new tile to verify the color match, it is a match and noticed that the new tile has rounded edges. Who does that? Who changes their manufacturing process on the same style of tile? So we did the math and realized that we could use a handful of new tiles and use up all the old tiles we had and the pieces. We only used up five new tiles to finish the floor. So in other words if they had not screwed up our five tiles and given us the wrong color we would have made it. In the end I had to cut of 3/4 inch from a full tile to get it to match the existing tile in the dining room. I was hoping the house was perfectly square but after 109 years I had my doubts. Not too shabby, only 3/4 inch and it was even across the opening.

We started tiling around 1330 and didn’t finish until 1830. Its amazing how long the cuts and odd pieces take. Mr Experience laid the last of the floor, I cut. I only miscut one piece and I cut some fancy pieces without breaking any. He had to float out two low spots and a high spot. I can do it but it just takes me longer. Sometimes, experience just wins for obvious reasons.

So tomorrow we will finish grouting, start cleaning up and then we have to wait 72 hours before we can do the final cleaning on the grout. After that cleaning then we can put stuff back. Annmarie and I have decided to thin out everything hard as we put it back so that the house is not as cluttered. The new wooden louvered vent cover has not arrived. It should be here in a couple of weeks per the website.

We had been trying to treat an eye infection in the barn kitty. It just keeps getting worse. Normally this is a live or die situation for the barn cats as they are feral. The kitten tamed down and comes over and wants attention every time we go out to the barn. I had Sarah (aka Meat head) take the cat to the vet. yep, it had worms, ear mites, an upper respiratory infection and an eye infection. So now we have to give it antibiotics and eye medicine twice a day and it needs worming medicine in two days. It is in a crate in the barn now. It didn’t like me washing its eye and had started to avoid me. So now its in hospital jail until its better. Of course the vet wanted to see it again next week. I told Sarah to make the vet call it “Barn Kitty #1” which she did. When Annmarie came home she reminded me the kitty’s name is “Soot” now I did not know that but now everyone else knows why the barn kitty#1 went to the vet!

It took us 2.5 hours to just get to this spot. We screwed down a board to use to keep our alignment down the hall perfect. The tiles kept creeping over toward the board and narrowing the gap. We had to constantly shift them back into place. We broke one tile by the entryway when Mr Experience stepped on it. He had been starring at it from across the room and went over and stepped on it and it broke. He said better now than after it was dry and locked in place. We kept trying to work with it until finally he suggested we just remove it and come back another day when we can walk on the tile and dry fit it until it was perfect then glue it down. It was a great plan and that is what we did.

We had to eat out at the minimart as we cannot cook anything. We did remember to move all the coffee making supplies to the opposite counter! Long Live Coffee!! I would love to say that food sometimes wins over coffee but who is fooling who, I would never say that! Coffee before all else is my motto. On the way back to the house I gave Mr Experience the tour and discovered that someone had ran a disc through the one field I had burned. I need to burn the second field soon so we can disc it and I can keep them sprayed all summer long so we can plant them in the fall. We are going to plant Round up ready alfalfa on about 20 acres. We are hoping to get around 60-100 ton/annually from this acreage. Currently we use around 35 ton for our animals. This will allow us to be more generous with the feed and to sell some to recoup the costs of our equipment.

As we got closer to the late afternoon we realized that we were going to run out of tile. The floor company called to tell me our extra four boxes have arrived but I never went and picked them up or had Annmarie get them. This is going to put a kink in our completion plans. I was breaking open one of tile boxes and found the wrong color tiles! There are 8 tiles to a box and 5 of the tiles where a different shade. We looked around but that was the first time we had noticed it and it is pretty obvious. I told Annmarie about it and tonight as she was going to be d she tells me we installed the wrong color of tile on the floor. I ran into the kitchen in a panic thinking we had missed a tile, but alas i could not see the problem. So I go up onto the stairs and look down at the kitchen floor. The last four rows of tile Mr Experience installed look glossy. Like they are a different kind of tile. I tell her its only a trick of the light. If I turn the kitchen light on you cannot see it. Plus those last four rows went in very easy so they they did not get handled much and are very clean. I will keep telling myself that until I can walk on the tile in the daylight and take a really good close look at it again.

No tile means we are taking Sunday off! I get to spend all day doing laundry. My upstairs laundry basket is overflowing and I only have three pair of underwear and two pair of clean socks left. It is time for laundry.

So far Zeke has stayed in the yard since I strung up the new wire fencing. One of the oddities of it is it is so tight that it now sings when the wind blows. I think it scares him so he is staying away from it. Whatever works to keep him in the yard is okay with me.