The boyfriend, working shifts as he does, has lots more opportunities to go visit the house than I do and the big news this week is that they started laying the tile for our floors. We have been eagerly witnessing the neighbors’ tile go in over the past few weeks (would dearly love to share it with you, invisible internet friends, because some of their choices are…. choices… but that does seem a bit disrespectful of their privacy and so I shan’t) and this week the boyfriend returned from one of his solo expeditions to report that finally our tile is going in too!

And thusly, a Thursday afternoon house visit was undertaken, because do you think I’m going to wait two more days until Saturday to see how the tile looks after all that agonizing? Don’t be silly.

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Hooray for floors! We are delighted with it – it looks just exactly as I hoped it would, and I feel that is a very positive result. I was also fascinated to see their method of laying the tile: they space the planks with those little plastic clips you can see, and then when the cement (or whatever goes under the tile?) is dry, they take the colored clips out and just the little clear plastic clip-holders remain. Those are dispatched by kicking at them so they snap off, and the part that is under/in between the tiles stays there to be included in the grout. Seems like a solid system. Also, they let us kick a few of the plastic clips off and it was fun! For, you know, five minutes. Doubtless very tedious to do the whole apartment. Thanks for all your hard work, tile professionals!

(Only tangentially related: one of the tile guys supports the same soccer team as the boyfriend, so they have bonded over that. I figure it can’t hurt to have him feeling warmly towards us generally… and hopefully by extension towards our apartment. Smidge boring to listen to them get into the details of recent games, but on the upside, that gives me plenty of time for documenting his work, as you can see.)

Super excited to see the bathroom wall tile go up hopefully soon! Also… now that the floor tile is in, the time has come to choose the colors for the kitchen. This seems like almost as momentuous a decision as the floor tile. Send help.