Tiling myself into a corner

Closets are real handy and we have lots of them through the house. With the start of the tile work I decided to do the closets first. As I started doing them it came back to me why I don't like tiling closets. They are a real pain to tile. One has to be a bit of a contortionist to get to the edges and back. In fact they take almost as long as a big room. Only a few tiles can go in whole in most smaller closets. This means all the other bits need to be cut and fit into place. Then once everything is perfectly laid out everything is stacked out of the way and it is laid again, hopefully exactly as it was the first time. 

After a couple of small closets I decided I like the big closets better.

Janis agrees of course but for different reasons.

-grampa dan

Shiny bling!

With the crown molding now up in the hall way it is time to begin installing the Heico LED lighting modules. There are six LED's per module and they are installed end to end in a continuous fashion.

 Plenty bright, the LED's are dimmable to create the perfect ambiance we desire. 

The electrican will make the final hookups cleaning up the temporary hanging wires in the pictures. He will also install the permanent power transformers upstairs in the electrical room. To test each circuit I threaded the contactless Heico LED modules onto the wires, peeled off the sticky strips and fastened them into place. Then I used some spare transformers to do a test fire of the lighting. I was able to install fifty modules (twenty five feet on both sides of the hallway) in less than an hour. 

This last shot shows how much brighter the hallway suddenly became with the LED's turned on. At full strength it is bright! Dimmed down it will be pure magic!

In the next few days we will finish the install of the LED lighting modules the full length of the fifty-four foot hallway. Once I am done the electrician will arrive to do the final hookups. Each added component of the house makes it more magic.

-grampa dan

Cutting corners

The main living area will all have the tile laid diagonally. It is a little more challenging to install but we believe the effect is worth the extra work. The bulk of the other rooms will have the tile laid square to the room. This means we need some type of transition tile work to blend the two styles. After much discussion and trying various things we decided a dark, square tile that is the size of the door jamb made the most sense. I fired up the (new) tile saw and started in on the task. There were hundreds of cuts to make.

We decided that the closets too would have the tile laid square to the walls. Although the closet floors will be the same color as the main room tiles a transition strip of small square tiles looks real classy. I spent the whole afternoon cutting tiles and laying everything out. Tomorrow I'll glue everything in place permanently.

Although it is a massive project, the tile work is going better than I anticipated.

-grampa dan