Title courtesy of my favourite Hot Chip song. So we’d been getting by with just those €5 black cardboard things over the concrete floors, but that was actually pretty depressing after not very many weeks, so finally it came time to get proper stuff in.
First up was the kitchen. It’s not a big room: 3m x 2m. With space taken out for units, that meant tiling it was a relatively straightforward operation (in theory). I read somewhere that if you use large tiles, it makes a small room look bigger. Wherever I read that failed to take into account the impact of uneven floors, which aren’t as forgiving when covered with 600cm x 600cm tiles. Anyway, we bought some and presented them to the handyman (henceforth known as W) to lay.
At this point I should explain the operating procedure that W used, which was to do bits-and-pieces, as-and-when. This isn’t a staggering departure from the M.O. of other tradespeople we’ve encountered, but nobody gets close to W in terms of sheer insouciance. I won’t go on about him too much as he’s a lovely guy and I’m writing this quite a few weeks on when (spoiler alert) it eventually got finished, so everything’s grand.
Day 1: 6 tiles down… nearly there…
… or not. Just 6 short days later, operation complete:
