One thing leads to another

A section of grout in Erin Mae's shower looked loose – not good news. Let's play safe and assume that tiles and grout on a narrowboat are subject to unusual stresses and need special attention. A quick google led me to Norcross 4-in-1. Never heard of Norcross, but the technical director has a narrowboat based at Aston, in which she'd used this grout herself. Where can you get it? Nowhere round us, it seemed, but the Staffordshire Tile & Stone Company had some, and they were at Milford, just down the road from Great Haywood. Nice bloke – doesn't normally serve retail, but he made an exception and we came away with a bag of the stuff.

The damaged section grew as I extracted it with a combination of a Wickes patent grout extractor, a paint scraper and an ancent Stanley knife. It was then I realised that two large tiles, 50 x 33 give or take a smidgen, were no longer quite as attached to the wall as they presumably had been. So off they came, and that led to a lot more energetic scraping of old adhesive from wooden partition and tile-back. Not to mention another trip into Stafford to locate some decent adhesive.

Then I sized up these tiles in the space on the wall, and realized they're a rather tight fit vertically. One or two of the mosaic-sized midgets below them seem to be bit too high. Do I try to remove one, and risk it's being part of an linked group? Do I try to file down the top edges and risk breaking one? Do I just ignore them? No, that's probably what led to the problem in the first place. Anyway, what's tile and what hardened grout?

Decisions! It all seems a bit more drastic than a house. Guarantee that, whatever I do, it will lead on to something else unexpected. Like, getting what I need in Stafford today, being parked in just the place and at just the time for this nice lady to turn her Mazda into the next space and scrape the paint on my driver's door!

Happy days. What a good life it is!