Home Improvement

We're having the hallway retiled this week.  Doesn't sound like much but our hallway runs through the entire house in this U shape with all these terrible angles to cut around.  John and his buddy, Jeff from work, stopped by at lunchtime to check out the progress and discuss manly things like hardie-board and joists with the tilers.  Jeff has a lot of home renovation experience under his belt but, honestly, there'd have to be a hole in the wall for John or I to realize something was up.  ("Waaaait aaa second."  "Was that there before?")  After deciding that everything was progressing as expected, they joined me in the kitchen.

John, "Man, this place is a disaster.  Those guys are working their asses off!"

Me, "Yeah, and you wanted to do the demo ourselves."

Jeff, "Nah, you definitely want those guys doing the demo.  They're the experts.  They have, like, muscles in their backs and everything."

John, "Probably take us twice as long."

Jeff, "Oh, they'll have it demo'd faster then we could make it out of the hardware store trying to figure out what tools we need."

(John just read through this and said, "You gave Jeff all the zingers."  Me, "Jeff said all the zingers.")

So Enrique and his buddy are here tiling my hallway and these guys are artists.  I don't know when we downgraded craftsman to the status of day-laborers but it's an injustice.  (It was probably after Murphy Brown was cancelled and Eldin was left without a gig.)  Enrique's been tiling for 20 years and he's younger than me.  I haven't done anything for 20 years.  Except breathe.  And I'm not very good at that.  (John, "You're a terrible breather. All wheezy and open mouthed." Me, "Exactly!")  They're not even swearing.  I know this for a fact because I may not be able to converse in Spanish but I know all the good swear words.  That's what exchange students are for, after all.

It reminds me of when we had the roof redone on our old house.  There was one guy who stood on the lawn and cut the plywood.  He cut each piece once.  And it fit.  Every. Single. Time.  It was sorcery.  It's the same with Enrique.  All the hardie-board went down with one cut and no blood.  They used the exact amount of tiles in the garage and didn't have to run back to the hardware store for more.  Twice.  Not once did they look up and say, "Well, I guess that's close enough." These guys used to have guilds and were kept on retainer by landed nobles.  Who cares if they only spoke Italian? "You must stay here and make my manor beautiful."  And, boy, are these guys making my manor beautiful!

Before:

 

After:

   

Me, "I'm going to make them a cake."
John, "They don't want cake!"
Me, "They deserve cake."

Me, "And that paint's gotta go."
John, "shit."