Day Four

I had a couple of email exchanges with KP Tiles - they made a substitution for white glass iridescent tiles - they had fewer in stock than I had ordered. They will send plain white.

My husband - Milos - is the tool man and told me not to buy tools - he had some already.

He showed me what he had but when we looked at my beginnners mosaic book and saw the most darling little glass tile nippers, he realized there are probably better tools out there. Let me get the tools he said. Milos loves to buy tools and his accumulation dating back to the 60's is beyond fathom. He is a mechanical engineer. After work he went to Home Depot to buy the plywood for the base and adhesive primer. Ninety dollars later he came home without the plywood but with a large mechanical tile cutter, nippers - not the kind in the book and packed in heavy impregnable plastic - a dainty handled grout spreader, non-sanded grout mix, and the adhesive primer. He decided the plywood should be 1/8 not 1/2 inch. I reminded him that the base cannot be at all flexible because the tiles might pop off in moving it, and he decided I should work on the wall rather than flat. Reluctantly I agreed to try it this way. He is the wood man and I need him on board with this. I will try working vertically - after all Michaelangelo worked upside down on the Sistine Chapel. He unpacked the nippers and realized that they were intended for thicker tiles than I will be using. $20 wasted? If he could have inspected them clearly in the store he would have seen that they were not right, but who can really look at anything these days? The Fort Knox packaging is inscrutable. The thick tile nippers will come in handy when we do other tiling projects in the future... maybe. We doubt we can return them out of the package, which naturally had to be detonated in order to open. It is in shards. This morning he informed me that he ordered the nippers from Amazon. He said it as if I should have done it myself, as if I didn't know. "You told me not to order any tools," I countered. I still don't have the plywood. I wonder about working vertically, but I am looking forward to the delivery of the tiles.