doing some floor prep

So - we did get our stove delivered the other day, but after I got it all unboxed - we saw a big dent in the back panel, so we had to call and have another delivered this morning.  Argh!  But the delivery guys were great, and our new one is sitting here ready to be installed.  Which I'll do in the morning....

With the money we got from selling our old stove ($160 bucks, woot!), I bought a tile saw on craigslist.  Our plan is to buy a tile saw rather than renting one - we rented one twice for the bathroom, and I could get a used one for less than that.  When we're done with our renos, we'll just sell this tile saw on craigslist for what we paid for it.  That's what we did with our old stove, actually - we paid 150 for it, so we even made a ten dollar profit!

This saw was only $130 - works great.  Well it did until the switch broke at the end of the day!  It's a 3.99 fix, so tomorrow I'll get most of the rest of the marble cut.  After spending an hour cutting a bunch of strips, I laid out a sample of the border on the sidewalk:

We tried several sequences, the original one I'd drawn up was a little too involved, so this is what she ended up with.  I have a lot of skinny strips to cut -- I need a total of 80 1" white strips, 32 1" black strips, 48 4" black strips, and there's the center black and white checkerboard of full tiles.  We brought some of the pieces in and took a look at how we're going to deal with corners --

We're working on the corners -- I think we'll mitre the corners of both borders.  Ironically, this is what I went out to do when the switch broke.  But taking a break was good, we had some errands to do and needed a break for dinner!  I'll cut the rest of the pieces tomorrow.  I can't wait to get started!