Home Improvement & Marketing Concepts

Life lessons from a friend. She originally posted this on her company blog which you can find here.

Tiling a Bathroom and Marketing

When I moved into my house, the bathrooms were carpeted. Really. So my sister, whom I dearly love, decided to help me one day while I was at work, and pulled up the carpet and laid down linoleum in my small guest bathroom. My sister had never laid linoleum before, but she had watched a lot of home improvement shows, and it looked easy enough.

To make a long story short, when I got home from work that day, my house was clean, there were fresh flowers on the table, and there was a note from my sister saying, “Sorry about the floor.” So, she had made my sons help her clean the house and bought me flowers to make up for the linoleum debacle. It’s hard to put into words exactly, but lets just say it’s a few years later and I’ve just now found the heart to tackle the mess of glue (on the floor and tub), misplaced silicone caulking, and the ripping up of the floor where, since it was cut way too small and crooked, she’d just filled in the gaps with caulk.

But finally, I’d had enough. I had to commit to the time to fix the flooring, regardless of cost and time. So, I bought some ceramic tile, which is lovely, but time consuming to install, especially for the novice, and got to work.

Once we stripped up the old floor, I had to make sure the concrete floor was clean from most adhesive and the rest of the mess. Then we had to measure and measure and measure once more, and then begin to cut the tile. I had help from a friend and my son, and the three of us made pretty good time. We rented a tile cutter and did all the cutting at once, and then laid down the tile to see how it looked before we started gluing.

So we laid the glue and tile, in sections, and then let it dry to two days. Then I grouted, and let that dry for two days. And then I sealed the grout and let it dry for a day.

This whole process made me think of marketing and how we often times want immediate results, but we have to wait. Sometimes we are left with a mess that seems overwhelming to fix, so we procrastinate until we realize the job must be tackled now. We finally dig in, align our team, and embrace the challenge before us. Then we realize there are other issues that need to be fixed and the project grows into something else. We need the right tools, a support staff that cares, we must measure and research, and do something. Reading about how to install tile on the Internet didn’t lay the tile—we had to just start doing it.

But, keeping our goal in mind, we finally finish what we set out to do and have a great marketing program…or a newly updated bathroom. Don’t give up. An overwhelming task can be a great challenge, and once completed, it feels great.

–Sonya

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