Mortar flies as deadline approaches

Husband-and-wife journalists Bob Miller and Callie Clark Miller use this space to offer their views on everyday issues.

HE SAID: I've made a lot of references in past columns about my lack of handiness and my cute, pregnant and talented wife's insistence that I can do things that I think I cannot.

That insistence is what got me started on an upstairs remodeling project that includes tiling a shower wall and a floor. It's a project that's been ongoing for more months than I care to tell you, but now the tile's hitting the wall as my indefinite and shrinking deadline creeps nearer.

Dawson's due in mid-April but we fear/expect he will arrive much sooner. The spacious, open upstairs area is big enough for us to use half of the bedroom for a nursery. Until I get the mess cleaned out, we will have no nursery.

It's been a grind. I've been working on the house every night until the wee hours, usually to midnight but occasionally past 1 in the morning. I broke a tile cutter the other day. It's supposed to score the tile and snap it. We got a couple of pieces to snap, but it was a horrible tool. In the end, my brute-force technique -- handed down from generations of Millers -- snapped the handle much better than the tool ever snapped the tile.

Nothing in this project has come easy. The laminate floor fiasco was discussed a few weeks ago. Laying the carpet was a bigger chore than it should have been. It's been a mess. A comedy of screwups and redos and uh-ohs.

I was making great progress until Tuesday afternoon when I checked downstairs to find 4 inches of water in our basement. It ruined a rug we had thrown down there for a craft area. And a lot of Callie's craft supplies were ruined.

Eventually, after fighting the water with a shop-vac for hours, I let Mother Nature do her thing, and I abandoned the basement to work upstairs again, hoping that my momentum would end Tuesday night with a completed floor. But the wet saw I purchased ("perfect for home improvement jobs" it says on the box) was junk, too. It took me almost two hours to cut four pieces of tile, and by 11 p.m. it was too late to try to cut another one. I could barely keep my eyes open.

Meanwhile, I'm wearing my last pair of clean pants, as Callie continues on bed rest. The kitchen's a mess and our living room is piled with baby stuff ready to be moved upstairs. And, oh yeah, my refrigerator is empty except for a couple of eggs, cookie dough, bread-and-butter pickles (meant to buy dill) and an assortment of condiments. My hope is that I'll get the shopping done, trash hauled away, floor laid, upstairs cleaned up, laundry done and the basement cleaned by this weekend.

I swear, if Dawson decides to come early, he's grounded for a week.

SHE SAID: Unlike with the laminate floors of a few months ago, the great Book of Do-It-Yourself projects did not indicate that laying tile was one of the simplest home improvement projects homeowners could tackle.

In fact, despite the color illustrations, the instructions in the book were quite vague. That should have been the first clue. The tile supply aisle at the hardware store should have been our second clue. There are rows upon rows of different products, each with a different technique and specific uses. We've discovered the more options available to you in home improvement projects, the more opportunities there are to mess up.

And mess up we did. It's impossible not to when working with mortar and grout. In fact, I suspect there's more mortar splattered around the rest of our house than there is in the upstairs bathroom where Bob was supposed to be laying the floor. I found a splatter crusted on the front door. The bathroom faucet and the kitchen sink are smeared. The bathroom rug in the downstairs bathroom has clumps of mortar stuck in it. Even the kitchen table had little clumps clinging to the edge. And don't look too closely at Bob's fingernails this week.

The tiling of the master bath was my idea originally. It looks so easy on TV and I couldn't wait to dig in. Except, I can't dig in to much of anything these days because of the whole bed-rest dilemma. The best I can do is keep Bob company, occasionally hand him a tile and make helpful suggestions throughout the process.

I'm full of helpful suggestions, aren't I, Bob? Like hanging the Christmas lights on the exterior of the house, this project was a true test of our marital bliss. Nothing about this project has come easily. And I think I'll be cleaning up mortar and grout from throughout our house for months to come.

Callie Clark Miller is the special publications managing editor for the Southeast Missourian. Bob Miller is Southeast Missourian managing editor. The mortar from his fingernails has fallen into his keyboard, further spreading the problem. Reach them at cmiller@semissourian.com and bmiller@semissourian.com.