Hitting the slopes

I wish I was talking about skiing, but alas it's the floor in our little entrance hall that is so off-kilter you could almost slide down it. As it has always been our plan to tile this floor some serious levelling needed to be done. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we could start on the floor the little shoe cabinet between the kitchen and the entrance needed to be built:

So, that job done it's on with the floor. First a 'self-levelling' latex compound is poured:

Unfortunately it doesn't actually self-level, but needs to be coaxed to a reasonable smooth surface by yours truly. A process that was being sabotaged we quickly realised by two holes underneath the front door step. The scene went something like this: 'There's a hole in our door, dear Dara, dear Dara, there's a hole in our door, dear Dara, a hole!' 'Then fix it, dear Paul, dear Paul, dear Paul, then fix it, dear Paul, dear Paul, fix it!' Which he proceeded to do in true Practical Paul style with a piece of tissue (not  previously used I am happy to say). Leak fixed we left the floor to dry...

 Then we were able to start tiling.

 Which is where we discovered that the floor was still pretty wonky, but we persevered...

Paul finished off the skirting on Sunday afternoon. Now we need to let the tile adhesive set, before thoroughly cleaning the tiles and then sealing and grouting them. A few more hours of work, but we are looking forward to finally completing this task. It's already a great feeling to come into this front room and no longer step onto a porous and uneven concrete floor. See you next time!