Day 2!

I love this 10-day Challenge thing. I can't stop talking about it. Somehow it makes everything so much better to think of our work as a game show.

Anyway, Day 2 was another success. We grouted our floor! That's all we did. Well, we also talked more about paint colors. Herb garden? Or New bud? Or Hearty hosta? Stay tuned.

The grout was an adventure, mostly in the researching of it. John did a huge amount of reading, asking, calling around to figure out what we needed. We were getting way different advice from online forums, the tile shop, the whoosie whatsis. Use this, but then we call Lowe's and they've never heard of it. Use that, but it's $22 for a tiny bottle and it has to be smuggled in from Sweden and it'll be like three weeks until we have more. (Really, we were actually told that.) Mix your own grout with concrete and sand and water. We were mighty confused.

In the end (of course!) the do-it-yourself grout appealed to us most. John went to the see-ment company by the railroad tracks and spent $14 on a big cardboard box of sand and a 94-pound bag of cement. This was a lot better than the $300 we would have spent at the tile shop, plus it gave him the opportunity to get in line, inside his little Rabbit, with cement trucks in front of and behind him. These trucks were getting stuff loaded in by crane, but for John the guy had to shovel sand into a box by hand. I wish I could have been there.

Once we were at the house and mixed this stuff up, it looked awfully brown. We'd wanted more of a grey color. Must be the orange-yellow sand. We debated for a while (should we shoot up to Home Depot, 25 minutes away, and get a different color sand?) and decided nah, just to go with it. As it turned out later, the homemade grout a) looks fine in brown when you actually get it between the stones and b) turns grey when it dries anyway.

Grouted it up. Here it is!

- Erika