Welcome to my blog

We moved to Ireland with the notion of building our "dream" home in May 2007 after purchasing the site earlier on that year. Mr C is Irish and originally from Limerick but he remains in the UK during the week, his job is running www.cruise.co.uk and earning the bucks that will hopefully allow us to "live the dream."

It's taken us almost two years but ground will be broken on the site by the end of May 09!! A lot of blood, sweat & loads of tears (all mine!) have gone into this project already, we left a fabulous house behind in Newcastle...and now for my Kevin McLeod bit, "can the new build can live up to my expectations and the old house we left behind"? I'm not sure...keep watching my blog and you'll find out!!

Friday, June 4, 2010

It's been a while

....since my last blog post and if I'm being honest I finding it difficult to know know where to start...good or bad first????

900 x 600 Brazilian Black Slate

The bad I think....we are currently having "issues" with the large format slate flooring not sticking (yes, sad but true....never been heard of before in the tiling world until "The Conlon House" but that damn slate just won't stick!) 


the variation in colour isn't as pronounced as in this pic,the tiles were wet, 
the lighter shade of grey is the true colour

Several brands of fixative have now been tested all with the same result - tiles don't stick!  


We are thinking that it's due to the heat coming in through the huge south facing windows and sky lights.....sounds implausible to be fair, this is Ireland after all, but it can't be ruled out!!  

Today's experiments are, 1) priming the back or each individual tile with a bonding agent and 2) laying a couple of tiles in the darkest, coolest area of the kitchen as a further "test" to see if sun/heat is really the cause of the problem.  Will check on the progress tomorrow evening....keep your fingers crossed they've stuck!!


It's not all bad I suppose, I really like the tiles and am happy with my decision to use them extensively on the ground floor....now if they would just stick...is that too much to ask?!!

2 comments:

  1. oh god, that sounds like a complete disaster, i've never heard of that happening before......in hot climate it's mainly tiles you see on the floor....
    are you putting an admix into the adhesive?

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  2. Wow, what an annoying problem! I can't imagine what the problem could be..Hope you get it resolved soon. Thanks for your lovely comment yesterday..Rachaelxx

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