On furious stretch of demolition brought us to the conclusion of the last article I wrote on my home bathroom renovation project. At this point in the story the tile, carpet, and vinyl had been removed (mainly) and vanity and toilet were destroyed. I was suffering from a bit of 9/11 lung but was otherwise prepared for the constructive part of this exercise.
The tiling activity started with a mild bit of panic. I had been planning all week to tile on Saturday and hope to enjoy Sunday with beer and football. This required picking up the rented tile saw from United Rentals before they closed at 5:00 on Friday. I left work a little early and was home with the saw by 3:30. After various organizational activities I decided to give the tile saw a try. Around 4:45 I realized that it was broken. The rotary blade was unable to cut more than a few inches into our 13″ tiles without seizing up. And the water pump was flaky, at best.
Ruth and I left the broken saw in the garage and jumped in my truck. We called United on the way to make certain they didn’t close before I got back. We arrived around 4:57, and picked up a second saw.
Thankfully the second saw worked so I was able to get started on Friday night. I wanted to spend a few pre-dinner and pre-drinks hours getting the feel for this mechanical beast and seeing how easy it was to slice off a thumb.
I think that maybe it’s a little tougher to remove a thumb with a tile saw than with, say, a rotary saw. I did so many bone-headed things at Habitat for Humanity like reaching across the rotary saw’s blade to grab something or to hold the protector back. In hindsight I am terrified about how poorly my career has prepared me to deal with equipment capable of terrible body mutilation. But, here I am, 10 digits in all.
After a few hours Ruth and I had the basic mechanics of this operation down so we cut out for the night.
Something to remember for those of you adding tile to your homes for the first time: the door frames are sized to go to the floor, obviously. But the top of the floor is dictated by the thickness of its cover. So door frames going to flat vinyl will usually extend closer to the underlying base (concrete, in my case) than door frames going to carpet or tile. In my case I had to buy a saw to cut the door frames up off the floor by another half inch or so. This would account for the tile and mortar. Here I am doing this.
Having that second tile saw in the garage the entire weekend was a minor inconvenience. Ultimately United Rentals was cool enough to refund my money for the non-functional saw, despite my not returning it when I went back to pick up a working one.
After we got the initial tiles down, Ruth and I went to Fiesta Del Mar and consumed a respectable amount of margaritas.
After hours more work we completed cutting and laying all of the tiles. But note that they’re only laying on the ground with spacers to show their final placement. They have not yet been mortared down. And here is where I explain the only significant mistake we made in the job.
The tile pattern is based on slate and seemed to have a “flow” of direction to indicate how the slate might have been cut from the rock (but note that this isn’t real slate.) I remember asking Ruth on Friday night if she thought that there was direction to the flow and after a little experimentation we concluded that there wasn’t. I also looked under the tile for any directional indicator and could find nothing. But remember that we did this with one foot out the door to Fiesta Del Mar. Our heart wasn’t really in it.
Anyway, after about eight hours of tile cutting the next day Ruth discovered an arrow on the bottom of the tile indicating direction of the slate “grain”. This meant that my original theory was right: every tile, cut or not, should have been oriented with a particular edge in the same location. The thought of pulling up all the cut tiles to re-cut new ones to make sure that the place tile would have the right orientation was daunting, not to mention completely demoralizing.
We ultimately agreed that we lacked the energy to redo every hand-measured and cut tile. We did fix the uncut tiles which, being square, could be rotated in any direction with virtually no additional effort. But we both know that the tiles around the edges don’t match the pattern.
Here those tiles are before mortaring:
The mortaring process is a bit hectic, in my opinion. Mortar dries and becomes difficult/impossible to work with after a certain amount of time. It appears that amount is around 20-30 minutes so there’s not a terrible rush, but you don’t want to screw something up royally and find yourself totally out of mortar (as we did.)
Our process for installing the tile involved Ruth shuttling the tile out to the garage to lay it down to match the pattern in the house. I would put down the mortar and she would bring in tiles and tell me where they went. Here’s her handiwork out in the garage:
So I’m in the house laying down grout and sticking the tiles to the floor. I started near the toilet and worked my way to my front door:
After several hours of this work the tile was down. As I recall we finished the cutting and mortaring in one day. But it was a very long day. And the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that we grossly underestimated the amount of mortar we used and had to go back to the store to buy more to finish the job. I think we finished around 9:30 or so:
A day or two later I put down the grout. This was pretty uneventful. It’s the easiest and funnest part of this job.
At this point some finishing is still required of the bathroom. In a somewhat out-of-order presentation, I’ll next show you our painting and vanity and toilet install. But let me provide a few key lessons for those wishing to try this on their own:
- Never trust the first tile saw that anyone provides. Even a friend of Ruth’s had a similar problem with a tile saw he purchased the day before our project that we were to borrow. You don’t want to put off an entire project because a saw doesn’t work.
- Pay close attention to the coverage for your mortar. It’s based on your trowel’s grooves’ sizes.
- Always check the tile for direction. In fact, if you think you have tiles that don’t have direction, get second and third opinions before starting to cut.
- Don’t waste your time taking vinyl off the floor. Latex-based mortar works great.