This Saturday did not pan out the way I expected.

I had planned to stay out on site Friday night and get all sorts of extra jobs done.

However, I had a rather adverse reaction to some medication I am taking and was not well enough to go anywhere on Friday evening.

My utility is in the workshop having the transmission overhauled so I needed to rely on Linda to take us out to site.

We needed to buy more feed for the kangaroos at a store that opens at 9.00 am - so after all sorts of messing around, we arrived on site at about 11.00 am.

The first job was to give the vanity cabinet patching a good sand down with an orbital sander.

While I was doing this, Linda was inserting special sealant around the shower plumbing fittings.

Next we needed to give all the screeded floor areas a good vacuuming to remove all the dust created over the last few weekends.

While Linda was doing this - I was removing all the debris and dirty black plastic from when we mixed cement and screeded the floor.

Since we last marked out the floor we decided to change from 1.5mm spacing to 3mm spacing between the tiles.

We experimented with the tile positioning and decided on aligning the tiles to bisect the garage to laundry door way. We then chased this back to check the impact at the far wall.

After a lot of head scratching and learned discussions we agreed on a strategy and laid out a number of chalk lines to guide the process.

Because the first tiles are laid over a composite of angle iron, anodised aluminium and concrete, we decided that we needed to use the rubber based adhesive at the door way.

When we read the instructions on the packet of adhesive we realised that we lacked the most basic tools for making accurate measurements.

The instructions called for 3 litres of water to be added to 10 Kg of powder.

We only wished to use 2Kg of powder initially so this needed 600 ml of water.

Fortunately, I had only just drunk 600 ml of Choc Milk so we fished the cardboard container out of the bin and this became our measure.

To measure out 2 Kg (or one fifth of the pack) we first tipped the powder in to a box and then used the bottom half of a plastic milk bottle to scoop it across to another container.

This took 17 scoops so from this we worked out that 2Kg of powder would fill 3.4 scoops.

After this we were able to make up our mixture and thoroughly mix it with a spiral mixer on the end of a drill.

This seemed very thick and I had to tighly grip the bucket with my shoes to stop it spinning.

Of course, the first tiles we needed to lay were the most visible and the most difficult, with the least amount of acquired skills.

We cursed and sweated and agonised our way through the process.

I had intended to pack up and leave at 6.30 pm, but before we knew it, the time was 9.30pm.

I think we have done these first few tiles correctly - but the amount of effort and time is out of all proportion.