440

The Vermont green slate floors are nice and subtle and go well with the earth tones of the tumbled stone shower tiles and the gray-blue of the walls. The floor guys ended up doing all the shower tiling, too, which was great because it looked like a lot of measuring and cutting. We had a bunch of extra tiles, though, so Jeph put them along the wall under the window and I grouted them. That’s some messy work. My treat for digging out pounds of soggy rock wool from around the old tub (cringing with every grab at the expectation of feeling a dead varmint) was a jacuzzi tub. Rich installed everything for us and the electricians (for a couple hundred extra) put in power for the motor and the heater. That first bath, after 4 weeks of wearing the same grubby paint-stained jeans, sweatshirt, and multiple other layers and doing dirty, tiring work all day every day, was pure heaven. It was the only method of getting clean (much to 6′3” Jeph’s dismay) for about a week, while we cleaned multiple layers of grout film, then sealed the grout and let that set, and caulked the edges and let that cure (the other shower still needed covers over the old fixture holes.)