The Exception That Proves The Rule

Today is my first day of work -- and yes, I am up at the crack of dawn due to first-day-of-school jitters, even though classes don't start for another week and a half and today is just a day of "orientation" -- so yesterday I did what any sane person would do on their last day of freedom before starting a new job: I tackled one last home renovation project.

Everyone knows that doing demolition work is always much easier than doing more constructive work. That is what people always say, and that has certainly been our experience -- it takes an hour to remove wallpaper, but many hours to paint the walls, for example. But yesterday, I found the exception that proves the rule in our tiling project.

As the picture in that post indicates, before we could tile the top half of the shower, we had to remove a single layer of bull nose tile to make the tiles be flush. No problem, right? Well, not in our experience. It took us close to four hours (though admittedly, there were other minor distractions) to remove that layer of tile and the mortar underneath it. Some of the tools we used include grout saws and crowbars and utility knives and wire brushes and screwdrivers and hammers. But, after working the better part of the day on that, we finally got it all off.

Compared to that, the constructive part of the job was relatively easy. I'll post pictures later on, but it took me less than an hour to hang the tile board on the wall, and tiling itself was fast and easy. There is still some work to be done on the tiling, not to mention the grouting and the cleaning of the grout. But tiling was indeed every bit as easy as many of you told us it would be. I just wish you had warned us about the removal of previously existing tiles.