It has been three years since I started my mosaic project on the garage. The first time I posted on it was August 6, 2011. It is embarrassing that it has taken this long to start on the grouting of the tile. I finished one side of tile work a couple years ago and it has sat, without grout. This year several tiles started falling off so I figured it was about time I get off my butt and finish this thing.
Mixing and applying the grout per the manufacturers instructions was simple enough. This is the first time I've grouted anything and it was an easy project. Easy is a relative term though. It still took time and I still needed to pay careful attention to what I was doing to make sure all of the joints were properly filled. After filling, you wipe it down with a wet sponge, ring it out, wipe again, repeat and repeat and repeat... until it is clean. Paying attention to the removal of the excess grout was also important. It was tedious but somewhat therapeutic.
The result is great. The detail in the tile seems to pop a bit now and the shapes and design seem more refined. After I finished the damp wipe-down, I went over the entire thing with a dry rag to remove any excess dust.
This has given me renewed interest in finishing this project. Sadly, the garden-side of the garage doesn't look half as good as the pergola side of the garage. It faces south and suffers from a lot of pealing paint. I also didn't take much care in adhering all of the trip boards to the substrate. I ended up spending a day screwing the boards back in securely and sanding all of the areas where paint came off. I hope to get another coat of paint on it today and start to complete the rest of the mosaic work.
I have a handful of projects to do to consider the basement "complete". I hope to have these done by Thanksgiving. They mostly involve trim and touch-up paint except for one big area: the bar floor. It's currently my daughter's play kitchen floor but hopefully it will one day become a bar. When we started the rehab, we had this bright idea that we'd collect ceramic and porcelain tile samples and do a mosaic floor there. Here it is, two years later, and we have a small handful of misc. tiles. Not very reassuring. 
Here's where the idea comes in. What if we could collect tiles from all over the US and beyond? What if we could get tiles that other folks are tearing out of their homes and recycle them in ours? Hopefully people do and are willing to send them to us so that we can incorporate them into our floor mosaic. I don't care about color, patterns, or shape. Variation will only make the floor more interesting.