This week's project is tiling a wall in the bath. Not by choice - the tiles showed clear signs that they wanted to fall off the wall. I had been hoping that this could be delayed until we were ready to install an all new kitchen and bath. Oh well.
As usual, opening the wall revealed some mighty sketchy work by the previous owner. No wonder the tiles wanted to decamp: the only thing holding them up was the pressure of one against the other. No adhesive, no grout. Beside leaving no room for grout, the supporting wall was "floppy". Tiles (being brittle ceramic) want to have a nice rigid support. So I set off for the home center to purchase some 2 x 4's to reinforce the structure.
In the course of happily cutting the timber to size, I noticed that the 2 x 4's are labelled "Made In Germany"
Imagine that.
Here we are in the United States, with scads of timber lands, with forestry workers out of work, and we are buying 2 x 4's from Germany. Germany that is a high wage country, where there is universal health care, pensions, and so on. We're not talking about Malaysia or China or Vietnam or Africa. Honestly, we cannot effectively compete for lumber with Germany?
Something is seriously wrong here.
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