Getting in a tangle

So now I have a moment to explain. Tiling the pool was complicated and the very last tiles went in on Wednesday 26th. The surface area of the pool was calculated to be 36.53sqm. I ordered 40sqm of tiles because of natural wastage and Spousie has managed to use only 36.22sqm. I don't know how he has done it but it is nothing short of a miracle. Never have I seen so little wastage, especially when you consider that the pool does not have 90 degree corners, it was accidentally built as a parallelogram.

On Thursday 27th I dashed into Skop early (past the morning poppies) to collect some pictures from the framer who has recently opened while Spousie rigged shade netting over the pool to protect the grout which was about to be applied. Upon my return from town we set about the grouting. It is an epoxy grout and once the two parts are mixed together you have about 45 minutes to use up the 3kg pot. Cleaning it off the face of the tiles has to be done immediately and so it is a two-person job. We discovered that in fact it is a two-person nightmare and fiendishly difficult to clean off the face of the tiles without simultaneously removing it from the spaces between them. Quantities of grout had been calculated by a specialist who knew how many tiles we had purchased and so we should have had ample grout, but after the first pot was completed it really did not look as though we had enough grout to finish the job. Orders normally take about a week to arrive and we simply did not have a week to wait. The grout requires five days to cure before the pool can be filled with water and our first guests would be arriving in twelve days. I dashed into Glossa with pulsating eyeballs to purchase better quality sponges and to plead with the hardware shop to have two more pots of grout sent by courier.

So here we are ready to crack on with the grouting on Friday 28th. Spousie has pots of grout and I have sponges and buckets. He mixes the first pot and starts to apply it and I am at the ready with my sponges. My phone rings. It's the IT guy from Skopelos Town, he's come up to fix the Wi-Fi. Did he think to let us know he was coming? No, of course not, he'll be here in ten minutes. I down tools and head up to our house to meet him. I tell him that we have an IP address conflict. He plugs some cables in, tells me it's working fine and goes away.

Later, when we decide we desperately need to contact the technical support team from the grout manufacturer, we discover that our internet has crashed because of an IP address conflict. I unplug cables and while it reboots I phone the IT guy who by now is back in Skopelos Town. We will have to resolve it some other time.

By the end of the day we have over half the pool grouted, it looks as though the grout we have might just be enough to complete the job but we aren't going to cancel the courier. I buy yet more sponges, more detergent and more white spirit. Technical support tells us we are using all the wrong stuff but it's way too late to do anything about that now. We can only struggle on.