We decided to get a tile saw again, but NOT from Oxnard Home Depot.  I went to the rental yard at the Camarillo Home Depot.  I touched the tile saws and ran the platten back and forth and picked out the saw I wanted.  As I was telling the clerk my tale of woe, he said, "Do you want this brand new one?"  I looked where he was pointing and there was a shiny tile saw with tons of accessories.  Who knew tile saws had accessories?

We fired it up and it was nearly magical.  One of the accessories was a fence that made a big improvement in the speed of setting up the cuts.  We cut all new strips and the worst ones we cut on the new saw were better than 95% of the ones we cut on the old saw.

The last, biggest piece of our project left to do is the counter tops in the kitchen.  We long ago decided on granite for the counter tops mostly because the material is relatively inexpensive.  While the material isn’t expensive, the fabrication (cutting, shaping, polishing) is very expensive, like multiple thousands of dollars more expensive than the cost of the material.  So we decided to go with 24" by 24" granite tiles.  We figured we would be able to install them ourselves, if we were careful with the design.  For example, we designed the kitchen counters with angled corners instead of rounded edges, so that we could cut the tile ourselves.

On Saturday morning, I went down to the Oxnard Home Depot and rented an MK Diamond Pro24 Wet Tile Saw.  This saw looked great, but when we set it up, we discovered that it was pretty worn out.  The platen that the tile sets on had a lot of play from side to side and did not move to the blade very smoothly.  We struggled to make the saw work all day.  We made the last major cut at about 8:15pm.

We still have a couple of smaller cuts to make, but we were able to lay out all the surface tiles.

Poppa with his game face on.

The final layout

Hopefully, the backsplash tiles (12" ceramics) will be much easier to install.

In the week before Christmas we had 4 cold days of constant rain.  One evening on the 4th day of rain, as I was working downstairs, I saw a familiar sight that made my heart sink.  Water was bubbling the paint in the ceiling.  I touched the bubble (which was the size of a grapefruit) with a screwdriver and water splashed down on to my head.   A leak that had only showed itself after 4 days of rain.  How depressing.

Last Saturday, as we were headed into a forecasted 9 days of rain, Lucas our roofer came over to check things out.  He grabbed a flashlight and began examining the roof area around the furnace that appeared to be the location of the leak.  After about 10 minutes, he showed me that the condensation line of the furnace had come out (been removed?) from the scupper and was draining onto the ceiling.  The area was was wet to the touch.  We returned the condensation tube to the scupper so that the water could drain correctly.

After 6 days of *solid* rain, there is no more water coming through the ceiling.  I am confident the ‘leak’ has been plugged.  Normally, we barely use the furnace.  During those 4 cold days, the furnace was being run for long periods of time.  The water built up enough to run down to where I saw it. 

I call finding the source of the water a ‘hallelujah and a half’.  First, we found the source of the water and fixed it.  Second, if the water hadn’t made itself known through the bubbled paint, it may have gone un-corrected for years.  It would have continued to slowly leak onto the drywall ceiling and we would have never known except when the softened drywall fell from the ceiling, like before.