Today, Mike and I picked up tile. We bought about 150 square feet of 20 inch porcelain tile, four 50 lb bags of mortar, one 25 lb bag of grout, and some spacers. The place is almost out of this tile, but they are supposed to get more in 2 weeks. Normally, you wouldn’t want to have tile from two different batches, but none of the areas to be tiled this weekend will touch other tiled areas, so minor color differences won’t be noticeable. I was gonna buy a cheap tile saw, but listening to other people, it sounded like the little cheap ones are a big pain. We went to Home Depot and they had them to rent for $54/day, which could cut up to 24 inches and has the blade on a rail. The saw they have is probably worth about $1000, so it should cut very well, and I figure we can get all of the cutting done in 3 days of rental, so about $180 (which is barely more than buying one of the crap saws). The kid working the rental shop said it would take about 8 seconds to rip a 20 inch tile, but I have a lot of trouble believing that. In any case, it should be very nice compared to smaller saws.

After Home Depot we dropped off the tile and took a look at the master bath. We started scraping the vinyl glue off, which is a huge pain. I think we may end up just leaving a lot of it on and tiling over it. We also removed the vanity in the master bath, so aside from the glue, it is ready to roll. Tomorrow I think I’ll give it another scraping and maybe use some soap and water, then give up.