Happy Floors and Fun with the Cat

Yay! After spending hours (dramatization) scouring the internet for ideas on how to fix our floor, I got frustrated and took the most American route possible: I drove over to Wal-Mart to look for a chemical.

Brazilian small-business/pay-someone-to-do-it-for-you be damned! I found a 9-real bottle of a product called "remover cera" (wax remover) whose label claimed it could also remove sealant. I didn't know what "cera" meant, so I went over to the dictionary section of the store and looked it up. Wal-Mart is like Google incarnate.

I took it home, tested it behind a door to make sure it didn't blow up the apartment, and it was a go! Hardly any scrubbing involved. It takes all of the sealant (aka sealer) off of the slate.
Of course, we'll need about 10 bottles for the entire apartment, but 90 reais is better than the 400 we'd have to pay some poor shmucks to do it for us. And I realized how ingrained my American idea of "why pay someone to do it when you can do it yourself?" really is.

The project is tedious, but satisfying! Here's some before and after pictures of our tile:






BEFORE (gross!)

AFTER (yay!)

And here's some fun sealant sludge:

Thanks for all the helpful comments and ideas! I hope someone else will find my blog in the future and it can help them.

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In other, equally unimportant news, I've submitted a picture of gatinha, our cat, for LOL cats!

please vote for her here so she can be featured on the LOLcats homepage! If you didn't understand that the green word was a link, go here:
http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3552298

Click the little cheeseburgers to vote! (5 is the best!)

I made another one, but I don't want people to vote on it until next week, so as not to divide up gatinha's votes between two competing pictures:
So I'll put up a link next week so people can vote for that one!
The whole thing was Alexandre's idea. He said, "send that picture to the lol cats! IMAGINE, if our Gatinha was lol cat?!" His sincerity to see his baby girl make it big was too adorable and hilarious to resist.

And speaking of pictures, I put up some fun pictures of all the rain/rain clouds on my Flickr. They're at the end of this set.

Job stuff is great, my schedule is dandy, without crazy job, I'm making more while working less, driving less, and working early only 2 days a week (and at 9am at that!). Yay! Quitting that job was the best move I could've made, job-wise.

yay!