Sore hands, legs and back!
We have been having some trouble with the tiles in our kitchen floor, the upshot of which was that we had to replace the walkway section with a different style. Tileworld in St Austell were all booked in to refit the new tiles but this meant we had to lift the old ones first. We started planning this back in the early summer as we had to close the kitchen for 3 days, 1 day to lift the old tiles, 1 day to fit the new ones and leave them to go off and then the last to grout them.
As with all good plans this one started to go wrong right atthe beginning - I had to chase George to get a couple of his guys up here to do the work but luckily I had come in my working clothes and brought my lump hammer and bolster chisel with me. The first 30 to 40 tiles came up really easily but after that it was inch by inch - luckily Norman, one of our kitchen porters, had a mini kango in the back of his car which was a great help but it was still really hard work. Not so bad for Neil and Ronnie who are more used to it but I must admit I was really struggling: blistered hands, wrist strain from the hammer and then a big knuckle on my left hand because my aim wasn’t always that good!
Once we’d got the tiles up we then had to get the last of the adhesive off the floor - we started with the chisels scraping away but this was going so slowly. I tried to find a power tool to help but nothing available that day, I did manage to buy a couple of manual scrapers which were better but not quite good enough! We got hold of a bigger kango with a tile lifter for the Tuesday which we did use to remove all the adhesive but this put us a day behind.
Wednesday brought the tilers who really got going and laid all the tiles by lunchtime - they even managed to grout them all by mid afternoon too so we were almost back on track! This just left us with all the cleaning to do this morning as you can guess how much dust the kango caused.
We have our Probus club in for lunch today and we suddenly realised we may not have time to cook anything for them with a choice menu like we normally do so we have had to offer them a buffet instead which we could prepare ahead in our pastry kitchen. There will be lots of work for the boys today to get ready for dinner tonight as the whole menu as well as the cafe bar menu needs to be got ready from scratch - think they’ll deserve a beer by the end of the day and it won’t just be me with an aching body!
