did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

   Years, I tell you, years. Years of dreaming, deliberating, getting ideas, being inspired, being disappointed, deciding, changing minds, worrying. Fretting, fighting, quitting. It's been years of putting up with delays and being unable for every reason to finish the ground floor of this house. And all this time, one of our most difficult decisions was how to finish the floor. Now the carpenter was demanding a floor. He couldn't take accurate measurements for the doors without a threshold.
   It's an old house, terracotta is traditional. Shall we stick with terracotta? We've lived with terracotta upstairs, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedrooms. We're sick of terracotta. It's dirty. It's porous. It takes more maintenance than we want to do. So what else? Old or modern? Dark or light? Shiny or rough? Underfloor heating compatible? Stone! Cut stone! What stone? Marble? No; surprisingly affordable here but too grand for a farm house. Travertine? Also surprisingly affordable but wine stains. Sandstone? Everything stains. Granite? Ridiculously expensive, dark and also stains. Wood? Really expensive, worthless for a kitchen. Alex fell in love with polished concrete. Very trendy. Very difficult and expensive. I didn't think I could do it. It would require a polisher, and then a treatment. OK, how about Ultratop, a synthetic, 'self-leveling' floor poured in retail stores. It looks like a fake polished concrete in the pictures. No supply store sold it. The experts came out. We ordered a sample bag. We talked a neighbor into trying it. Theirs bubbled and they barely talk to us now.

'Tiramisu' from Carducci l'edilizia
giorgio7carducci@yahoo.it

   Desperation drove us to Omar. Omar is a modern day rug merchant, but Omar doesn't sell rugs. He sells tile. Not Chinese tile. Italian tile. Gres porcellana. Ees beeuteefull. Anytheen you want. Omar has built a three storey temple to Italian tile where people like us can find salvation. We took home heavy samples that looked stunning in his temple and ridiculous in our muddy ruin. With our capacity for decision-making exhausted, we chose a tile identical to our white-washed walls but with one concession to fashion: 'large format.' Our tiles are a meter square. I'm not supposed to lift them by myself. Pondering the methods of laying these monsters, I realized that such large tiles will magnify any

irregularity in the surface of the structure supporting the tile. A wave, crack or seam in the concrete will be amplified three feet away into a sharp, tripping edge. Panicky, I rushed to YouTube for tips and found a genius in southern Italy who has invented a tile spacer with a leveling cap built in. These draw the tile edges level with adjoining tiles while they are still floating on fresh glue. With $100 worth of these gadgets and another $100 worth of high-tech setting cement waiting, I'm now cutting our precious tiles to fit the wavy walls of our rooms.
    I figure by the Ides of March the world will be judging my work. And knives will be waiting for me in the forum.