A Senior’s Early Years—Floor Tiling For Dummies

I tiled a hallway floor once. It was the 1960s, so there was no internet or YouTube to tell me what to do. I had to go to the hardware store and talk to the guy who sold paint. He didn’t know anything about tiling floors, but he knew a lot about paint. He wanted to know what the flooring was in the hallway. I told him it was old linoleum, over old hardwood. “Why don’t you just paint over the whole shebang?” he asked.

So I went to the library and read a manual on tiling. It told me what tiles to buy, how to glue them down and what to put between the spaces. I measured the floor and tried to figure out how many tiles I would need, exactly like the manual said. It was complicated. I wasn’t very good at math, so I took out my old math book from grade 8, and turned to “Solving Problems”. But I couldn’t find anything about tiling. Instead I learned about ball caps:

“Sam bought 8 ball caps, one for each of her eight friends, for $8.95 each. The cashier charged her an additional $12.07 in sales tax. She left the store with a measly $6.28. How much money did Sam start with?”

That one wasn’t much help, but I got excited when I found a problem using measurements:

“Mr. Cheap wants to buy enough sod for his new field. The length of the field is 30 feet, the width of the field is 66 feet. How much sod will he need to buy? How much will it cost him if the sod sells for $5.00 per 25 cubic feet?”

I didn’t know anything about cubits, so I gave up. I measured the whole floor, and wrote down how long it was, and how wide. Then I went back and asked the paint guy to figure it out. He did. I would need 320 tiles, he said. He showed me the tiles, and I picked a nice looking brown, with edges that were a little darker than the centre. It would look beautiful, I decided. Next, I had to choose the grouting, which would go between each tile. But they only had white, and I could imagine how dirty it would look in just a little while, with two children and a dog coming in and out all day. “But,” he suggested, getting excited, because he knew all about colours and paint, “You could dye the grouting with lamp black, for contrast”.

When I got home, I spread the tiles out, using the spacers in between. Then I spread the glue with a trowel and fixed each tile in place. In a few hours it was all dry, and I admired my work: the tiles all glued in place, neat rows with just the right amount of space between each tile.

It was summer, and the kids were home from school, but today, they were going to the pool in town with their friends. The minute they left, I put the dog in the yard, and started to work on the grout. First I put the powder in a pail and mixed it with water, until it was just the right consistency, like the package said. Then I started to add the lamp black. It didn’t take much. I accidentally dropped a bit on my bare ankle, and a black blotch immediately appeared. Wow, I thought, this is strong stuff, and decided to read the instructions.

“Use with care”, it said, “Lamp black is permanent if not wiped off before it dries”. I put on a pair of coveralls, and old shoes, and rubber gloves, and went to work, smoothing the black grout over the tiles. The cloths for wiping were right where I could reach them. I worked fast. If I timed it right, I thought, I could wipe all of the grout off the centre of each tile, and leave the edges a little black. It was going to look beautiful! But right now, the whole floor looked dark and gloomy. I just started to wipe off the grout, when I heard it.

“Yoohoo!” It was Mrs. Jacks, the neighbor from two miles down, who loved to drop in and stay for two hours. When did she get here? I didn’t hear her car. Usually I heard it, in time to duck somewhere and pretend I wasn’t home. Even the kids knew what to do.
“Yoohoo.” she said again, this time peeking in the window. So I let her in. And I made some tea.

“Oh”, she said, when she was settled on the couch, ” I have such a lot to tell you!”

I kept thinking about the tiles, and the grout drying all over it.
She was telling me about her preserves—how she got such a good deal on peaches at the general store, and how she was going to reduce the sugar so that it was better for her diet. I didn’t care.

At last I jumped up and said she could stay in the front room, but I had something very urgent to do. I ran to my floor and started wiping. The grout was almost dry! It was quickly turning into cement. I got on my hands and knees and started scrubbing.
“…and then I decided to make some peach jam”, Mrs. Jacks was saying. She was right behind me. I just grunted and kept on scrubbing. Soon her voice stopped. She was gone!
I kept wiping and scrubbing until the children came home. The tiles were still quite black, but at least I could see some brown in the middle of every tile. When my husband got home, I asked him how long he thought the black would stay on the tiles.
“Hmmm”, he said, looking serious, “Maybe forever.”