Ma Belle

The upstairs hallway has become a remodeling obstacle course.

The Great Bathroom Remodel of 2017 2018 continues apace, which is to say it is the typical remodel project in that it is taking twice as long and costing twice as much as expected. But progress is being made!

For the past two weeks we've had the tile guy working upstairs, which is longer than we had expected but not as long as we had feared. We had not known the tile guy before the day he appeared, and that happened when I was out of town.

"So, what's he like?" I asked Husband eagerly.

"Well, he has a pretty strong Spanish accent so I'm not sure what he said his name is. Melissa, maybe?"

Husband is brilliant and has a superb mind for numbers but he is not quite so keen on the subtleties of spoken language. The accent, it turns out, is French, and the tiler's name is Michel.

Michel came here from France five years ago and is a true tile artiste. He has wrangled the un-square walls and wacky foibles of the House on the Corner as if he were Michelangelo connecting God's finger to Adam's on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There is no "Whoops--didn't quite come out even" in his work. When the towel rod was just an inch too close to the projected location of the shower door, he was popping those tiles off and re-positioning them almost as soon as we had pointed out the miscalculation.

His communication process, however, has a measure of Gallic grumbling and hand waving that I am unaccustomed to in our run-of-the-mill phlegmatic Kansas craftsmen.

He was especially unimpressed with my choice of black grout for the shower.

"Zee black? Eeet is DEEFEECULT!" he handwaved. "With zee white, frah-frah-frah (he pantomimes efficiently whisking away the excess grout), but with zee black? FRAH-FRAH-FRAH." And the intense scrubbing necessary to clean off the tile being installed was truly heartbreaking.

Fortunately, I have had four sons and am unmoved by handwaving and difficulty, because the black grout looks amazing.

This morning Michel arrived to begin grouting the floor tile, and he asked if I'd checked on his progress yesterday.

"I could not love it more," I told him. "Do you like it?"

He grinned.

"But of course!"

He is zee best.