Grout or Stout

I knew that something was a bit fishy on Friday afternoon. At the end of a long few days of orientation, a group of fellow faculty members and civilians were going out for beer at a local brewpub and we had our standing invitation to join. However, instead of joining them we opted to keep working on the tiling in the bathroom. Our logic, if trading stout for grout can ever be considered logical, was that there's always time for socializing later but if we don't shower soon then nobody would want us to join them for drinks. (OK, we do have a second shower, so our rationalizations don't make complete sense. But work with us.)

Over the course of the weekend I did finish the tiling project (with one very small exception, which we will get to momentarily) and K. got the rest of the bathroom about 99% done. We also managed to make it to UU church, Lowes, and The Forty Year Old Virgin, and I got a haircut that will hopefully look presentable to my students and the other people I have to see in the world as opposed to the scragglyness that I have let it get to while I was in Revivalizing-All-The-Time mode.

And now, some pictures of the evolution of our shower. We understand that many of our readers have been unclear about what the project was, so hopefully these photos will make it make sense:









And the finished project:



Well, the "finished" project. You can see in the picture on the right that we are short one bullnose tile on the trim on top. We're not really sure how this happened -- if it was an arithmetic error in the store, miscounting the number of tiles, losing one along the way, or a rounding error based on assuming tiles are 4" instead of 4 1/4" (I'm banking on the last option). In any event, we will be headed back to Lowes to take care of that, but in the meantime we are ready for the plumber to show up tomorrow morning to plumb the shower (and build our laundry center), and we will at long last have a fully functional bathroom in time for me to shower for the first day of classes.