Shouts From Down Under

Grout-chy update. Light or dark is up to you

I have never grouted before, but I have been grouchy the odd time.

The bathroom doesn't seem to have progressed much, but one of the more tedious jobs is done. The floor tiles are finished being grouted and don't look too bad for a beginner. Plus the fact that our son has left home to make his fortune in the North.



I did a quick google search for "how to grout a bathroom floor", to see what was said on the subject, and I read the first article after the usual sponsored adverts at the top that I avoid at all costs. (Why do people persevere to advertise such spammy, doubtful, dodgy looking advertisements is beyond me)

It said that light coloured grout is more difficult to clean than darker stuff. Light coloured grout will bring out the major colour of the tiles. Whereas a darker grout will magnify the pattern (marble in our case) of the tile and accentuate the edges if they are patterned or designed with special edge features.

We chose black grout even though our son advised that he didn't like working with it. But he did use it and the tiles he grouted for the shower are very good. So obviously care had to be taken not to get dobs of the black muck on anything other than the floor where I was grouting.

The job itself isn't rocket science once you have the consistency right and the technique with the grouting tools. Wiping off excess grout and smoothing each gap with a finger soon had the floor looking tops. As I've said before, you should always dress the part for every chore like this. Ahem.



Now I just have to fix a leaking toilet cistern supply tap, plus extend the vanity pipes up to where they'll join the vanity basin mixer fittings. The old pipes have a leak and the fittings are unmovable; tight to breaking point, so I'll just cut the pipe off and start again. I'll join on some new copper and that should be right.

Next up will be plastering of the bottom of each wall with wet plaster sheet. Hard rock sheeting I believe it's called in other countries. We call it Gyprock here or just plaster, as I said. In our old jalopy house, you can see the old way of doing this exposed when we removed the lining off the bathroom walls. There are bits of timber across, called lathes, and then those tradesmen of the 1940's - 1950's troweled on plaster that bonded with the lathes. There must have been quite a technique to do this, and get it beautifully smooth and level like they did.

But to remove it now is a terrible job, dirty, dusty and leaves your whole house full of plaster dust. Most tradesmen these days hate lathe and plaster lined homes, and even after you've removed all this stuff and got rid of it out of the house, you'll still most likely have problems lining it with new plaster sheets. It wont be square; that's the problem. Everything you go to do, to fit, to add on, will be out of plumb, out of square and need a lot more fiddling to get right.

Well, this blog entry has nothing to do with writing I guess, but hey, if I can make up an entry out of grouting a tile floor, surely anyone can think up a much better blog entry.

Yes, grouting can be a dark subject, highlighting the need to be fair and square about writing. No cutting corners, or throwing around scrap words. They may stain people's clean minds worse than you'd think.

Once you grout all the gaps in your novels' chapters, gluing every scene together seamlessly and let it dry, there's no changing it then. As it said in the grouting article, "Once grout has set, it's almost impossible to remove".

Sparky