Still here.

The tear-out list

Let's get the record straight first, because nobody else in this trade seems willing to say it out loud.

Over the twenty-six years I've been doing this work, I've had stuff torn out. I've had showers torn out. I've had backsplashes torn out, because the homeowner didn't like it — or because I just did a shit job. I've had trim torn out. I've had to repaint stuff differently. That's the list, and it's not a short one, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise on the internet.

Every tiler who's been at it as long as I have has a list like that. The difference is whether they admit it. A torn-out job isn't a rumour in this trade; it's a Tuesday, eventually, for everybody. Materials fail. Judgement fails. You pick the wrong product for the wrong place and the wall tells you about it later, in front of witnesses.

The last one torn out on me was only last year, as it happens. Wrong material on the job, on a shower. Got torn out. I stood there looking at my own work coming off a wall, same as I have at intervals for twenty-six years, and the familiar question showed up right on schedule: why do I keep doing this to myself?

Leave, cry, or own it

Here's the thing I've learned, and it took most of those twenty-six years to learn it properly: when the work comes off the wall, you've got three options. You can leave. You can cry. Or you can own it.

Leaving is the easiest, and I've thought about it. More than once I've stood in a gutted bathroom doing the maths on a completely different life — something indoors, something with chairs. Saying you know what, forget it, I'm going to go and do something else is a very tempting sentence at the end of a very long day.

But instead of quitting, I'm still here. I'm still working. I'm still learning every single day — after twenty-six years, I learned something new this week, same as every week. If you're not learning, you're not doing it right. The tear-outs are part of the curriculum. They're just the most expensive lessons on the syllabus, and you pay for them in full, in front of the client, with your own hands doing the ripping.

The five-star merchants

Which brings me to the people with the perfect records.

For all the people out there sitting on pages of five-star reviews who say they've never done a bad job in their life — they're full of shit. Nobody does this work for decades without a failure in the pile. Nobody. It takes the best in the business to fall more than once; the falling isn't the shameful part. The shameful part is the performance of never having fallen.

You're a better businessman — a better tradesman, a better anything — if you can get back up and work again. Getting back up is the actual skill. The rest is just grouting.

Your own worst critic

And here's the part that surprises people: some of the work on that tear-out list, I tore out myself.

I've stood back from a finished stretch of my own work, looked at it properly, and thought I don't like that — and taken it off again, at my own cost, on my own time, before anybody else had the chance to have an opinion about it. That takes a bigger man or woman than fixing something a client has complained about. When the client complains, you've got no choice. When it's just you and the wall and your own standards, you've got every excuse in the world to leave it. Everybody would have said it was fine. I would have known.

You have to be your own worst critic when it comes to work. Not in the way that eats you alive at 3 a.m. — although there's been a bit of that too, over twenty-six years — but in the way that keeps the standard where it belongs: above what anyone's paying for, above what anyone would notice. The standard isn't the review. The standard is whether you can drive away from the house without thinking about that one corner.

Don't ever give up

So that's the whole philosophy, if a tiler's allowed one. Things will get torn out. You will get it wrong, sometimes expensively, sometimes in public. You can leave, you can cry, or you can own it — and owning it, it turns out, compounds. Every correction made me better at not needing the next one. Every job I ripped out and redid taught my hands something they still know.

I keep getting back up. Never give up. It's the biggest thing ever.

Twenty-six years in, the knees complain and the list of tear-outs is long, but the other list is longer: the showers still standing, the floors still flat, the rooms still right. I'm still here. I intend to stay.

Don't ever give up.

— Simon Beames

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