About five years ago we built a house. We wanted tile floors in the laundry room and kitchen, but the builder was balking (and wanting to charge a fortune!) Seems he was having trouble with the tile subcontractor. Well I went down to the local tile store in San Jose (American Olean, BTW) to check into some tile. There in front of the store they have a bunch of tile sitting on pallets. Nine cents a square foot. Really. "What's the story?" asks I. The story is that this is a custom order (real expensive custom order, too, it was $15 per square foot stuff) for a new restraunt in Santa Cruz. Seems the building was one of thoise that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake and insurance covered the tile, but nobody really wanted it anymore. They were trying to recover their storage costs of about $200. Well, this was just what I was looking for, and under my budget, too, and I didn't care that it didn't match any other tile color. So I bought it. The whole lot. 2000 square feet of tile... I went to home to get my old VW singlecab. You know how $#$%^%$ heavy tile is? I didn't at the time (this is also full vitreous tile -- really heavy stuff). Each little bitty box was 1 foot by 2 feet by about 2 inches, and weighed 70 pounds. They looked at my VW and shrugged. I folded down the side. They picked up a pallet and dropped it into the bed. Creak. Groan. Well, at least the tires didn't pop. I drove to our rental house in San Jose *real* carefully and got really sore moving tile off a box at a time. Went back for the second pallet. I figured that each load was close to two tons. Wow. The next hurdle: The new house was 180 miles away, near Yosemite. Up and over the Pacheco pass. Four trips, a ton each. And that old '57 VW faithfully moved it all... We tiled much of the house, but still have never gotten around to tiling the three-car garage, or the workshop, or the patios -- we still have several tons of tile. Sitting next to the big pile of VW parts... malcolm
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