In the Nick of Time

So, while I was at school Monday night, Jim constructed the hearth frame. Then while I was at school Tuesday night, Jim & his friends Adam & John laid the tiles out and cut them. Then yesterday, Jim got out of work early and started tiling. I helped him finish grouting late last night. But giant kudos to him for doing it all! I'm now working from home today waiting for the contractors to come to install the stove. Here's the pictures.

Home is where the Hearth is

While the majority of this weekend was spent doing (or casually avoiding) homework, we did get in a trip to Home Depot Saturday evening - ah yes, once upon a time I used to spend my weekends dancing the night away, and now I spend them at giant big box stores for home renovators! Their selection of trim tiles was not very fantastic, but they had some white cove tiles in stock. I unfortunately forgot to bring a sample of the subway tiles I had, but decided it would be better to just buy the tiles and hope that they matched. (turns out they were a "close enough" match) The interesting thing is that Homer now carries a subway tile in stock, an option that did not exist 3 years ago when I was buying mine. I suppose they have become home mainstream again now. I will say, though, that they are inferior to the DalTile special order subway tiles that I have.

The rest of the evening was spent trying to lay the tile out into a configuration that would work for the stove. This is where the best and the worst of working together comes out. Luckily, while Jim and I approach things differently, the collaboration generally makes the plan better.

This is what we laid out:

The blue tape is the outline of the stove. This size meets all the requirements, and hopefully is not too intrusive in the room. I will have to say that working in the herringbone pattern makes things a lot more confusing than working on the square. We were trying to figure out the angles for the corners, so of course I took on a mini engineering project to figure it out. I'm sure that a high school junior could have figured it out in a fraction of the time, but my geometry skills are a little rusty....... it took me the longest time to figure out that my calculator and Excel default arctangent calculations to radians. And then it wasn't until this morning that I realized that we should make all the angles 135 degrees (instead of one at 131 and the other at 139) to be in line with the layout of the tile. If I've lost you with my math ramblings, just remember that my mind was rambling around this for an hour last night.

That's pretty much as far as we got. I left today open for church and struggling with advanced financial WACC calculations. But now I think we're ready to draw and cut out the platform on the next free day.