So the gods of self leveling concrete were not smiling upon us last week. All that work we did on Sunday to level out the patio area was for naught when we got 3 straight days of solid and driving raining starting just a couple of hours after the concrete was poured. All that heavy rain pounding and sitting on the concrete made it sink a bit in the middle. Technically it should have even by dry at that point and able to withstand the rain but one of two things went wrong. Or both things went wrong…who knows. First off there was crazy high humidity last Sunday cause of all that impending rain so that definitely affected the drying time. Also, we checked the manufacturers website who makes the self leveling concrete and they said even though the bag says to use it within a year of purchase, that they recommend using it within six month because it has an active ingredient that stops working after a while and often the stores don't rotate their stock. Our bag was 9 months old but might have been sitting on the self at Home Depot longer. We had another old bag but decided to throw it away and go to Home Depot on Thursday night to buy a new bag. They Friday night after work we poured the new bag of self leveling concrete and smoothed it all out so it would be ready for tiling first thing on Saturday.
Also Friday night we had our inaugural grilling session, completely with filet mignon au poivre, grilled potatoes with homemade herb/parmesan butter and string beans baked with garlic, olive oil, lemon zest and roasted hazelnuts…it was delicious! I would say the steak was 97% perfect. It was a tad on the medium rare side but still tasty. We just need to let the internal temperature on the thermometers go a couple of degrees higher next time and it will be perfect.
Today, Saturday, it's 85 degrees here in New York. Pretty much the first day of summer and everyone is acting accordingly. We spent the whole day working outside and taking advantage of a few nice days in a row. It's actually supposed to be 88 tomorrow! Maybe it's time to take the covers off the AC units…hmmm. So we inspected our concrete and all looked good. We used my handy mosaic guide to map out the mosaic first so we could get a feel for doing it with actual tiles. The job would have been much easier with the same sized tiles, but I think this will look much nicer in the long run. When all the prep was done we snapped out our first chalk like to start off of.
Here's the slate tile close up next to the side walls we painted last weekend:
Then it was time to mix mortar and start tiling. The space was too tight for both of us to work in right now so Eric got to tiling and I got to fixing up our blue front door.
The blue front door is powder coated steel which means the paint is baked into the steel which is supposed to make it last longer and keep it more impervious to scratches and the like. However the door has taken quite a beating over the last few months with two tenants moving out and another two moving it. Also, Eric accidently wiped off the door with a rag that has some Goof-Off on it and it took off some of the paint finish. So we needed to repaint the whole thing just to get a baseline back. I worked with Alex to get the best match on the paint as possible, and got some recommendations from the paint store around the corner on how to repaint powder coated steel. It's not as straight-forward as you might think. First I had to sand scuff the surface down a bit to prep it for receiving paint. Then I had to prime it with a primer designed for metal. I used our existing Rustoleum Rusty Metal primer since we still have a few quarts of this from painting all the radiators. This is the front of the door taped up and primed.
As people were walking by and seeing me paint the door I could tell they weren't happy. Not everyone likes the design of our house but the blue door is pretty much universally loved. They got their wish a few hours later when I sanded the door again and then applied the first coat of the blue paint. And then it got interesting. The paint is not really paint at all; it's a Polyurethane enamel which means it has the consistency of part oatmeal, part glue. It was a pain to work with. And every little imperfection shows in it. It was so sticky it was pulling all the fibers out of my paint brush and bits of cotton off my roller. I kept picking these pieces out with my nails which was a big mistake. Once the first coat was done I needed to give it 4-6 hours to be dry to the touch but I couldn't apply the second coat for 12 hours. And I have to apply a second coat within 24 hours for it to bond properly so that is on the agenda for tomorrow. However it took me longer to get the paint off my hands and nails then it did to actually paint the door. This stuff is lethal! Tomorrow I am wearing gloves and using pliers to get any stray brush or roller pieces. Pics of the new blue door to come tomorrow.
While I was working on the door and taking the top few layers off my skin to get the paint off, this is what Eric was doing:
This is what Monk was doing
Eric got about 90% of the floor tiled today so he is confident he can do the rest plus the ledges and stairs tomorrow. So no grouting this weekend but we can do that together and get it knocked out in a couple of hours, maybe even one night after work this week. We'll see. Now we are grilling again. Yum!
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