We are very excited to finally start our big floor mosaic. As you can see we are staying quite close to our original plan but as always when you work on a project like this, ideas for changes come as you are working. We decided to give the points of the second star different colours to strengthen the connection with the elements, yellow for east and air, red for south and fire, blue for west and water and green for north and earth. We added all our tree roots and made the tiles go slightly onto the trunk in layers to really incorporate the tree into the floor. No one will walk right next to the tree so it is alright to have the floor slightly uneven and built up for a few centimetres around the trunk. This is the most exciting mosaic project we have done so far and now, three days in, we just want to go on working to see how it will all turn out.
It might seem like a big project but because the pattern changes and different colours are added in, it never gets boring.
We use trousers with knee pads as the work is mostly done crawling around on your knees. It is important to keep going over the surface with your fingertips and the palm of the hand to feel for any tile pieces that are not flat. The detailed work and the tiny pieces in the middle star required a lot of work but now we are on to the sections with background colours, so we should be able to move along a bit quicker. After two days tiling, the finger tips were sore from being in contact with the tile adhesive, so now the medical latex gloves are coming in handy. They are surprisingly strong and do not rip even when coming in contact with sharp tile edges.
In other news we have knocked a big hole through the back wall of the cottage and now we can walk from the kitchen and into the extension. Tomorrow the plumber is coming to install the radiators so we had to grind a channel into the cement floor for the water pipes. The house is now more like a building site than ever with every surface thickly covered in builders dust. We can’t wait to finish the build and be able to live a slightly more normal life. But as the saying goes, no pain no gain.
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