A fun little Sunday afternoon project begins. Decided on this time for two reasons - I had the motivation to get it done and I wanted to get the shells off my living room floor before the boys destroyed them in their journeys back and forth through the room. I wasn't really thinking when I laid it all out right in the middle of the path we need to take to get from one room to another. Not to mention I need a mental diversion from the temperature reading on the thermometer. We decided to pry off the tiles which were glued directly to the drywall. This created holes in the drywall that we had to patch. Luckily we had leftover drywall in the garage from past drywall project that we could use to patch so no last minute home improvement store runs were necessary.
I was a little panicked in the beginning as said project was wildly unsuccessful. Gravity was not my friend and I troweled off all the mortar to start over - the hope being that making the mortar thicker would solve the "running" effect problem I was battling. The shells were literally sliding down over the top of each other.
This seemed to solve my problem and once the mortar was thick enough and had set a little, I found that pushing the shells into the mortar worked like magic. Trial and error with a little panic mixed in.
Kekoa wanted to help part way through, so he helped me place a few shells. This cost me about 45 minutes, but it was worth it so that he could feel a part of the process. I'm hoping to be done before midnight, but who knows. Taking a little break. One and a half hours to do one side. Only 3 or 4 hours to go... Monster Rehab drink in hand... the night is young. And Craig thought I was a messy cook.
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