Wednesday 9th June
The tiling begins
Without even time to unpack a single bag, I was at the school at 8am to meet the tillers, who were already there. It has been hard to find the tillers, but in the end, just before leaving last time, Martin the builder gave me a card he had picked up in the building centre. Peter, a Hungarian tiler, agreed to do the job, and had been to see the plans and had looked at the concrete, once finished, in my absence, so he knew what to expect. I am sure that when I contract builders to do these jobs for me, I am asking them to do something rather unusual. Most of the time Peter is tiling bathrooms, kitchens, floors. Then he comes to me and discovers that I want him to tile some three dimensional toadstools in a school playground. Quite fun, I imagine; a bit out of the ordinary, but challenging, too. The only problem was communication. Peter speaks very little English, so there was a lot of sign language and waving of arms. We worked well together despite this hindrance.
The first day we covered nearly all the “tops”. Due to the problem I had in extracting the polystyrene forms from the fibre glass moulds, I did not have proper 3D shapes to work from, which meant that working out the exact size and shape of the mosaic panels to snuggly cover the curved “tops” was difficult and involved a certain amount of guesswork. This was the only option, because the concrete was being cast while I was away, and I was coming back to jump straight in and do the tiling. How successful these estimations would turn out could only be discovered once we set to and paid the tiled sections out.
The first “toadstool” revealed that the pieces did not fit very well! This was considered to be a “big problem” by the tilers, so to reassure them that I was in control, I quickly grabbed some tiles and my nippers and filled up the gaps with new inserts. No problem! And so we continued, working as a threesome. In fact, we worked very well together, them applying the adhesive (after coating the concrete with a PVA sealant) and the tiled sections, and me filling in after them.
We worked quickly and efficiently and by the end of the day we had completed four tops and the last was almost done. Then we covered them with plastic and left them overnight.
