This house was a sad fixer-upper when we bought it.  I’m sad to say, it’s still a sad fixer-upper.  I’ve also discovered I’m excessively ADD.  I’m so old I was never diagnosed years ago in school.  That diagnosis didn’t exist back in the Neolithic Age when I was going to school.  I was just that kid to keep busy and out of trouble and hopefully out of mind…………nice try.  But I’ve seen my ADD in action with this house, now that ADD does exists & it’s a real thing & I have it.  I’m also fairly sure that it runs in my family.

My daughter has a favorite T-shirt.  I’ve gotten two for her so far because she likes them so much she wears them out.  The phrasing on it says something like this: “They say I have ADD……..but I don’t know what that is…………Oh Look! A Chicken!”.

I love that T-shirt.

Yep, it looks like ADD is in our DNA.  But with a fixer-upper house, it can be a big problem.  We never seem to finish a fixer-upper project.  We have so many of them partially completed.  The bidet from one bathroom is under the truck shed (under a tarp———I didn’t want to look like “that” red-neck family), the tile from the other bathroom is in the process of being ripped down (along with the wallboard), we leave a sledge hammer in the bathtub so we can take out our angst on the dangling tile as we pass by.  There is a growing pile of abused tile in our old bath tub.  The toilet in one bathroom is working, the toilet in the other bathroom is missing………………in a family of four with three women, we’ve gotten pretty good at “take a number and wait”.

I have virtually finished putting down the Mexican Saltillo tile throughout the floors in the house.  One partial bathroom and a couple closets to go, and then I’m done.  I started tiling when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter in 1993.  The tile started out at $.75 a piece when I started………………they are much, much more than that now.  Home Depot no longer carries them.  Now I have to seek out obscure tile shops all over the city.  I did like the original Home Depot ones though.  They were definitely made in small villages in Mexico.  I’ve found debris molded into them:  Coca Cola caps, ring pulls, lunch debris.  They all got put down.  I like unique.  There were a number of them that had a variety of dog foot prints in them.  I really liked those.  I would place them in special places around the house where they were easy to see.  One employee told me that some of them had chicken tracks in them, but I never found one I’m sad to say.

Keeping in mind that I’m an old hippie, during college the Carlos Castaneda series was in vogue.  You started with the “Yaqui Way of Knowledge” and I can’t remember where you ended up.  But one of the books had this cool character in it who had a cottage with Saltillo tiles laid in intricate/hypnotic patterns.  Well I’m not a tiling-artisan by no means, but I thought I could give it a shot with my limited skills.  So I laid all of the tile in compass-true directions.  I thought I had a faulty compass once when I was trying to lay the tile in the bathroom.  It just didn’t look right visually……….then I realized I had the compass right up next to the bathtub……..the cast-iron bathtub.  Ah those basics in life———gravity and magnetic North and iron’s effect on compasses.

I’m also one of those people who believe in good-luck charms.  So to that effect there are lots of things in the mortar under the tile:  pennies, nickels, dimes (quarters add up too quickly).  I remember very clearly one afternoon of mortaring with my daughters in their walkers.  (I always had to rinse grout off of their tiny little toes after a day of tiling.)  They were mimicking me by throwing their respective cereal snacks from their walker trays into the mortar.  So there are Cheerios and Captain Crunch down there too (they never got Fruit Loops———too many artificial colors———and we never, ever compare any other artificially-colored food to my Moon Pie’s artificial colors———Moon Pies are sacrosanct & culinary perfection & beyond reproach).

So somewhere in the near future the Mexican tiling will be completely done (says the old woman with excessive ADD).

Oh look!  A Chicken!