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deprocrastinated retiling
Sunday, April 27 2025
The weather had cooled down yesterday afternoon and by today the clouds were gone and temperatures were back down in the 50s, so I wore a hoodie when I took Charlotte and Neville (both came!) on their morning walk.
I then took advantage of my rare weekend presence in the Catskills and the cool (but otherwise nice) weather to resume a chore I'd been procrastinating since November, the renovation of the house's front entrance slab. That slab has been covered with a veneer of bluestone since 2004, and in recent years some of that bluestone had delaminated. Back in the fall, I'd used a small jackhammer to clear the slab down to concrete in a patch at least ten square feet in size, and then I'd tried to come up with a new, denser bluestone tiling design for this patch. But then cold weather arrived and I'd shelved the project. Then before Gretchen had headed off to the Midwest this weekend, she'd reminded me of that chore, and it seemed reasonable to finally finish it.
I used the small jackhammer to clear a small additional part of the slab and then cleaned the bare slab as best I could (it had picked up some organic matter over the winter). Then I worked to come up with a new tiling design with bits of stone. To make things easier on me, I cut some stones to fit, making sure to break them in somewhat irregular ways, since a straight wet saw cut looks out of place when using such natural materials. It took a couple hours, but eventually I had a design I could live with. So then I mixed up some portland cement and used it as both thinset and grout between the stones. I must've used at least fifty pounds of dry cement mix, which was a bit more than expected.
After that, I was filthy, so I did my second laundry in two or three days. Then I climbed in the bathtub for my second bath in two days.
[REDACTED]
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