Tile Class

The theme of renovation must be "getting up early on your day off."  This morning Sean and I got up and sent ourselves to "Tile Class" at The Tile Shop in Sterling Heights.  We arrived a little late, it starts at 9:30 am every Saturday morning, but at least this time I had coffee in hand.  Our tile consultant was Steve Arcuri, and I would recommend making sure he is the one teaching the class if you are going.  Given I haven't observed anyone else teach this class, but he was great!

Now, we may have not watched him show us how to lay a single tile, but he did something so much more important, he taught us all how to get started.  There was about 6 people that equaled 4 different projects and he addressed each project in detail.  I personally was a little overwhelmed.  Yea, I thought that we would just pull up the vinyl flooring and just lay those babies down.  Good to know that my husband was a number of steps ahead of me and the instruction that we were getting wasn't a surprise to him.  But, you can imagine my surprise when I realized the samples on the wall would pertain to us.

I had no idea that there was that much work involved.  Good thing we are starting with a small room and have some time.

Really the thing that impressed me the most was Steve, he is the guy I would have loved to have met when I was discussing cabinets at Home Depot.  This guy loved talking about tile, how to tile things and was excited that you wanted to try to do it yourself.  As we walked around a little after the class we saw him with the young couple that was in our class, giving more personal attention to them, knowing they were working on their first house.  That is what made me decide that we are going to buy our tile from this guy.  He likes what he does, he understands where were coming from and he really wants to help, not just sell us tile.

I guess this class really got Sean in the mood to tile.  As we are now watching a Black & Decker video on tiling.  He must be really into the tile thing because this is painful to watch and after our class this morning, I'm realizing all the things this guy is doing wrong.  I would almost rather sit here while Sean watches the Matrix, again.  Well,almost.