During the night, sometime between succuming to the opaque stillness of sleep and reluctantly and begrudgingly opening my eyes to a grey and snowy (WTF?) morning, I morphed into a crippled 89 year old woman. I literally heard my knees creak like an old cellar door as I climbed out of bed. I painfully shuffled through the cottage and limped downstairs- Nick watched as I stumbled off the last step and then burst out laughing. Mistake #1 for Nicholas for the day. One would think that after living with me for six years Nick would realize that it is detrimental to his health and physical well being to pick on me in the morning and it can be considered a death wish to laugh at anything stupid that I may do, or say, before I've had a single cup of coffee. I snarled something at him that kinda sounded English; he calmly put his trowel down and said: "Lets go to town. I'll buy you breakfast and all the coffee in Quebec first, then we'll go Rona to pick up a few things." I growled in reply and limped like I was recovering from a bullet wound all the way back upstairs. I contemplated not putting shoes on to save myself bending down, but alas, the effing snow put the kabosh on that idea. It pains me all the way down to my soul to admit this, but he was right; I felt better by the time we got home. Some more Advil and I was good to go. The plan for Tuesday was to rip up the old floor in the bathroom and lay the tile in there and then put all the slate up on the two walls behind the fireplace. It was an ambitious goal to say the least but I was hopped up on Advil and caffeine so I agreed that it was brilliant.
When we first bought the cottage three summers ago, the downstairs bathroom was atrocious. Truly hideous. We knew we couldn't afford to gut it at the time so we prettied it up with some inexpensive fixes. One of those fixes came back to bite us in the ass (which was already sore from all the squatting.) We didn't rip up the ugly red/brown/green/yellow linoleum on the floor- we just place the sticky tiles on top to make the floor look nicer and easier to clean. So today, instead of having one old crappy floor to pry off, we had two. And let me tell you, they knew how to glue linoleum in 1971. That stuff was glued, tarred, stapled and held down by over-boiled Quebec maple syrup. Or so I was told by Nick- I surely wasn't any help prying that junk off. So back to Rona's we went to buy a heat gun ("It come in it's own case! Look at all the attachments it comes with Rachel- this thing is great. I'm buying it.") While Nick swore at the floor for the next two hours, I did the spring cleaning upstairs (Shoot me. In the head.)
After the heat gun saved the day, after the walls were washed, and after the tiled kitchen counter top that some moron thought would be an awesome idea was scrubbed, we finally started tiling the bathroom floor. Nothing to report there- just amazing tiling skills. Thank you Mike Holmes. We stopped for supper and the mandatory Advil/A535 intermission because honestly, at this point I was fucking hurting. My back was still great, oddly enough...go figure. I was so glad to take a break from squatting to place the tiles once we got to the fireplace walls in the main rec room. A little reprieve was in order. Actually a sizable reprieve because we ran out of slate 3/4 the way up that second wall. Luckily, on our last trip to Rona, I noticed the same slate, for the same price. Trip #3 to Rona would have to wait for tomorrow as it was well past midnight at this point and I was already walking like a hobbled diamond miner from Ecuador. Advil, wine, bubble bath. Rinse and repeat.
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