Notes in hand, and eager to begin, we hit our local Home Depot. Roaming up and down the aisles, we quickly stocked up on the necessities:

tile
mortar (to adhere the tiles to the floor)
grout (to seal the space between tiles)
notched edge trowel (for applying mortar)
rubber float (for applying grout)
big sponge (for cleaning excess grout off tile)

Since the Mexican saltillo tile we’d be using is very porous, we discovered that we’d also need to buy tile sealer and a gloss finish.

We came home, cleared all our stuff out of the office and into the rest of the house, then quickly set out to rip out the carpeting and get the concrete cleaned up. We were finally ready to start working with the tiles.

The process proved straightforward enough, but just so much more time-consuming than we’d anticipated. Do-it-yourself instructions always make everything seem so fabulously quick and easy – they breeze over the long boring bits with words like "repeat with remainder" or "wait 24 hours." In real life, however, the tedium rapidly becomes apparent.

Friday night we sealed each tile and waited. Saturday, we sealed and waited again. Then mortared and troweled and stuck a tile in place, mortared and troweled and stuck a tile in place, mortared and troweled and stuck a tile in place … and so on and so forth until our backs were very hunched and very sore, and the room was a neat little grid of not-quite-evenly spaced lovely Mexican tiles. Naturally, at this point, it was time to wait some more.

So Sunday morning arrived and most of the room was now covered in lovely squares of tile. It was time to deal with the perimeter of the room, which would involve cutting tile to fit to the edges of the space. At this point, we realized, we’d be needing a wet saw, since our big, thick tiles couldn’t be handled by a cheapie tile cutter. Now apparently, Sunday of a long weekend in springtime is a bad, bad time to be looking for home improvement equipment, because every homeowner in town is bound to have the exact same idea that you do: that now’s the perfect time to tackle the fix-up project they’ve been putting off for months now. Still, after several phone calls to equipment rental stores, my sweetie managed to track down a wet saw that was available for the day.