Our marble flooring has been an adventure of highs and lows with close shaves and laborious supervision. This has been accentuated due to us contracting Alex by ourselves. I've always wanted work through Norman but he wasn't keen from the very start on marble. So it's fallen to me to watch the marble installation closely.
Yellowish Grout On White Marble
Today I met up with Alex because our grout lines were very visible, especially after the polishing. It's becoming a deep yellow against our primary white marble. And the worst part is that the yellow is starting to colour the marble veins and areas beside the grout lines.
Although I'm not one to fuss a lot about aesthetics, Meimei made a good point that the common comment about marble grouting is that you don't really see it. So to find ours becoming more prominent after polishing rang bells in our heads. Something is seriously not right here ....
I showed Alex the grout yellow grout lines and the many areas that were starting to stain. He was very open about it, never once giving me an excuse why it is so. He simply took in what I offered him and he asked his workers to begin polishing other areas to see the effect of the grouting.
He replied later the same day that he has asked his workers to clean out the grout in the entire place. It's a good thing we caught it at this juncture before further work is done. I cannot imagine the horror on Meimei's face when the edges of all the grouting start to turn yellow after a year. It's good that we are trying to fix a potential disaster right now.
Of course how much of it is fixable is debatable. The grout lines run about 1-1.5cm deep and even with a grout removal tool shown in the above picture, it may not go deep enough to clear out all of the yellow grout. But as it is, there is nothing else we could do further to rectify it. I'm crossing my fingers that once the off-white grout goes in it'll dilute the yellowness of the original grout.
Running Out Of Skirting
I really have to thank my lucky stars for this save. I had originally planned not to go down in the evening today. But somehow as I was driving home ... I diverted at the last minute to the left junction and went up to PIE towards Bedok. And I cannot even begin to describe how important that was.
I arrived at 405 to find that the skirting were all up. But from the corner of my eye I caught two spots where the wall was still blank. A small section beside the master bedroom and the area right by the balcony drain were empty. I rushed into the kitchen to check on the skirting stock to find that none are left. I confirmed my fears with the Chinese marble uncle ... we had ran out of skirting.
I had kinda anticipated this may happen since we didn't update Edward on the extra laying of the marble in our storeroom. That room plus the shoe cabinet area alone would take about 15 pieces of 45cm skirting. So as it turns out, we are lacking 3 pieces for the dining and balcony. Just 3.
Now I wasn't going to call Edward to order 3 pieces of skirting. It's economically impractical since it's going to involve delivery charges. So I quickly turn to brainstorm for alternatives. I had originally instruct the Indian worker to lay the tiles in the storeroom last incase we ran out of skirting. Alas I failed to relay the same message to the Chinese uncle. Then a thought suddenly popped into my head. Can we pull any of the skirting in the storeroom to complete this area? And I recall there were many broken odd pieces in the kitchen, those can go into the storeroom ... who cares if its ugly in there?
I immediately called the Chinese uncle and went about trying to pull the skirting from the storeroom. He tried with a spade but the cement had dried. However thankfully the skirting at the section where we were going to fit a built in shoe cabinet was just installed an hour ago. So we managed to pull out the half-dried cement (the raining weather helped delayed it) and used these fuller pieces for the dining and balcony. In it's place, we are forming the skirting here with the smaller pieces you can see in on the left of the picture above.
I really dodge a bullet this time. If I only came tomorrow, we wouldn't have been able to pull any of the skirting. I cannot imagine the hassle and cost to obtain a few more pieces of the skirting. The biggest hurdle was that I hadn't paid for the current batch of skirting yet. I had planned to only pay after installation are done and if I had to go back now, I would be at Edward's mercy.
Phew! This episode has taught me to watch the marble installation like a hawk. Anything that can possibly go wrong can go wrong. I'm leaving nothing to the professionalism of the installers (if they had any to begin with) and chance.
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