Saturday 13 March 2010

The window sills

Finally, back with broadband! Some updating to do:

Although things felt like they were moving frustratingly slow, we have had a very big week. It took four days, but we have the sills re-tiled. After washing them all last weekend, when the tiler arrived on Monday I spent the day cracking old grout off the tiles.


Then the backs were ground down with an angle grinder to remove old adhesive and clean them up.. this process alone took the poor guy helping the tiler over eight hours (actually, there were two guys - the first one on Monday did about five hours, but couldn't come on Tuesday because he got heat stroke - true story, last week Christchurch got it's whole summer jammed into five days).


Finally, the fronts of all the tiles had to be scrubbed with turps to remove paint splotches that had gathered during some slap-dash paint job in years past. I don't have a photo of this, as I was the one doing the most of it - it was about 30 degrees outside, my ankles swelled like footballs, my hands were shredded by turps and scouring pads and I got sunburnt. Don't need a photo, as I'm sure you can imagine how attractive I looked.

This took hours and hours. About three hours in I really started to question why we didn't just buy new tiles. They don't make them anymore, but they make ones that are very similar....

Anyway, while we were prepping the tiles, the tiler was sealing the sills.


And then the real action started:


Finally, at the end of day three, tiles were laid.


And on day four, the grout was applied..


New sills! Hoorah!

The best news is that that's not all we achieved last week - more to follow shortly!

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