Material discretion; Floor tile and the Michigan bottle deposit scam

Hello Newman.

Work is moving forward nicely and the trades are are taking over. Electrical, plumbing and the boiler guy are all on site daily so our focus has turned slightly towards finishes -- most notably the kitchen floor. The gc has been hired to deliver basically a warm lit shell. When he leaves we will have a painted drywall box without finishes so we can take over and fuss with them for the next two years. This fussing began in earnest this week with the discovery of of an abandoned stock of encaustic tile at the Historical society of Albany NY back door warehouse. According to Alli 'encaustic tile' is just like regular tile only heavier, more difficult to work with and with a lead time of about 16 weeks. it's also pretty much up to one guy named 'Gustavo' in the area to order and deliver it and he stopped returning our calls 3 weeks back. The minute you try to call in your designer discount the phones go off the hook the offices of Gustavo Inc. It all began via cryptic text message photo from a friend in Albany:

I'm pretty sure that's the lost Arc of the Covenant up there on the left.

On an off-chance we might be interested he snapped a photo of this abandoned stock of tile at the local salvage yard and sent it on. 10 minutes later he was pulling together an order over the phone while we looked up the color codes online. All in all we found and ordered about 29 boxes of this forgotten stuff from an old man in Albany who was glad to move the inventory. Apparently a distributer in the north east gave up on the local branch and after finding the costs to ship the inventory back to California too high - donated the lot to the Albany Historic Society, who have been pushing this boxes around the warehouse for months. All in all we saved about 75% off the Gustavo rate and we're supporting the smugness of re-use and rehab approach - but with one siginificant caveat. The original seller of these bailed on the shipping costs for a reason. these 8x8 tiles are incredibly heavy - so much so that only 13 fit in a box to keep the boxes manageable at around 40 lbs. The 300 square feet we've bought weighs in somewhere north of 1200 lbs - or just a little too much for most conventional shipping. In fact, it's a little too much to fit in just about any conventional car and since we now portage via volvo instead of the pickup truck this gets trickier... What has resulted is a calculation formula not unlike Kramer and Newman's number crunching to crack the michigan bottle deposit scam from Seinfeld. The weight, gas use, vehicle size and one-way vs. two-way rental agreements have locked me in the house Howard Hughes style trying to find the way not to undo the great deal with a ridiculous delivery cost. But, in the mean time Sean was kind enough to bottom out the Jetta to drop off a few boxes on his visit to town this weekend: