As an indication of how behind I am with posting projects: this one is from Christmas! I went home to Dallas, Texas where my family of 6 was gathering at my parents house as we have every year since the kids left the nest, but I knew this year was going to be different.

Ever since my parents finally rid the house of their child infestation, they have been taking on little home improvement projects. Their most recent endeavor was replacing all the carpet with tile in both the living room and our TV room. It took them months just to do the TV room, leaving them too worn out to tackle the much larger living room, so they decided to use the winter holiday as an opportunity to exploit their progeny.

The first of MANY steps to the whole process, was removing all carpet, baseboards, and scraping clean the concrete floor slab. I didn't really get too involved in this step.

Next up was figuring out how to lay out the tile. Everyone says to start in the middle of the room and work towards the edge, but we had the challenge of trying to align the tiles to the adjacent TV room.

After messing around with tile layouts, and trying to shortcut towards the center of the room, we settled on just starting in the corner and working out from there.

Laying tile was a two person task. Working in small patches at a time my dad troweled out the quickrete. Following along, I would be laying the tiles themselves using 1/4" spacers to keep them aligned and evenly spaced.

Almost all of the work was done on hands and knees. My sisters 8th grade volleyball knee pads were pretty tight, but very useful as I laid out tile. I was only in town for one week, and this was as far as we got. The remaining steps are some of the most difficult: cutting and laying the tile at the edge, and adding the grout.

Some people might be skeptical of doing manual labor for the holiday, but to be honest I didn't really mind. Too often, family visits turn into an excuse to stay up late watching TV and movies, so I was glad for a change of activity. Next year, perhaps we can tackle the lighting?