The Tiles Mines have finally yielded a finished product at 555!

For the last two weeks, in between rainy days, Sakaguchi-san has been coming over to lay the tiles I laid out in stripes in November. Yes, they sat there for six months before anything happened to them.

My plan was creative and complicated. The tiles are all different thicknesses and sizes. Without a cutting tool, I decided to use only whole tiles and my patterns incorporated small tiles into the stripes to make them fit fully side to side. It was cute but overwhelming.

Every time Sakaguchi-san came by for other work or just to say hello, he looked at the tiles sitting there and shook his head. “Not done yet?” he’d gently mock me for not executing the plan.

One day he stopped by with some news that he’d be going into the hospital for open heart surgery. He told me that if I wasn’t done with the tiles when he got out, he’d come over and do it. And that is exactly what happened.

But not exactly to the crazy plan I had laid out.

Sakaguchi-san is meticulous and he is practical. He simplified my design and used a cutter to fit the tiles into full lines and he used 3mm spacers to ensure the lines were as even as possible. This allowed for satisfyingly straight lines of grout from end to end. Cutting the tile also allowed tiles to curve neatly around the circular lids of the septic system.

And the patio is level, instead of being an uneven surface, like I would have done. His first action was to find the right height for the tiles – aligned with the top of the lids and flat side to side across the slightly sloping concrete pad. Due to the slope and the varying thickness of tiles, every tile had to be laid into a different thickness of mortar. And the orange tiles from Spain needed adhesive rather than mortar because they are quite fat.

Even simplified, this was a challenging project. We switched around the tiles -replacing multiple stripes of small tiles with the leftover 60 cm tiles from the front patio. Not only did it make the the work faster, but now we have color continuity, too.

It took several full days to lay the tiles, and then Sakaguchi-san did the grouting. He has been looking at the grout on the other patio and “tsk tsk”ing our poor job which has gaps and cracks. So of course he did the stripey tiles perfectly. Because of the randomly sized tiles, not every grout line was the same width so I know he was challenged by this. He got it all done yesterday and I couldn’t be more happy with the results.