Terrace of slate creation and icing on the cake...

On top of the concrete foundation of the terrace on the right side of the vinoteca we have used some sort of slate stone. This natural stone is not from Mallorca I believe, but from the mainland of Spain, maybe even Italy, no idea. A few years ago we bought 3 pallets of this stuff, assuming that having the material would make us use it earlier. However, this trick did not work, we could have bought it last week. Anyway, it does not rot away, no overdue date, and the wooden box around it was still in tact.

It was the first time we made such a surface, so you will always have to upgrade your skill set just by doing. My goal was to keep the seam between the stones the same size and not leave large spaces open with nothing. This is quite a puzzle in fact and the next time we should first lay out the whole pallet on the floor, grouped in the main shape types. It proved that we needed many times just a certain shape, either triangular, square or roundish. Since the thickness of the slate varied from 1 cm to about 4 cm, we decided to place it on top of a layer of 4 cm of mortar. Or better described differently: the total height of the mortar and the slate should be 6 cm, the same height as the aluminum rulers we have.

The result is stunning, very well succeeded in not leaving large gaps between the slate tiles. Sometimes we had to hammer off a small piece, but we did not use a grinder at all (too much noise, dust and it's not easy to mask the artificial cut). So it takes a bit more puzzling to find the right tile, but good progress was made overall.

The final part of the whole project was filling the seams, grouting the spaces between the tiles. We use a self made grout from 1 part white cement and 5 parts marmolina, sawdust of marble. First fill the seams with a little excess material, wait for a few hours and then brush it off with a stell brush and a sponge. We tried to get the grout just a bit lower than the actual level of the slate, so each individual slate tile would be appreciated for it's shape and colors.

Icing on the cake
In the winchhouse - the construction where the old winch is placed which pulled up the coal from down in the mine - there are two steel buckets hanging on either side of the winch, connected to the break pads. These buckets are filled with iron balls of around 2 cm diameter. I assume this had been done to enforce the breaks of the winch. This was about half year ago. After having made the wooden door for the vinoteca I thought about these balls to use them as grapes of part of a cluster of grapes, welded together, include some leaves made of thin iron sheet material and hang it on the door. I never forgot this, but first things first, this was the icing on the cake, after everything else had been completed. Today it was time to work on this and the outcome is more than satisfactory, I did not believe I had it in me. Again it's just a matter of not being afraid of what you don't know or skills you don't have: "Just do it!" and if you keep your head in the right place, you will probably not disappoint yourself.