Finally Tiling

The most nerve racking part of the whole project began yesterday for me. Tiling! It's nerve racking because it's something I haven't done a whole lot of, but I love the look of tile so it's quite worth it in my opinion.

My dad came over early Saturday to lend me a hand, his tools, and his brain. Since neither of us had ever tiled a shower floor, this was all new territory for us both.

We got the tile laid out and to our surprise we only had to cut some tiles out at the perimeter on only one wall. Otherwise, the tiles fit perfectly without any cutting. The one kind of tiling that we've never done actually turned out the be the easier of the two floors we tiled. Largely because of how few cuts and how faaairly square the shower walls were. We had to use some extra mortar towards the middle to raise the tiles a bit so it'd be flush with the fancy schmancy brushed nickel shower drain grill we bought. Otherwise, it was a very straight-forward job. Dad and I both were happy with the result. Plus, we had that floor hammered out by lunch time!

Then, there was the rest of the bathroom floor we had to tile. Cass and I decided to use a single row of the tiles from the shower floor as a border and then use 6" square tiles in a diagonal layout. Little did I realize laying tile diagonally in a rectangular space isn't as easy as it seems. This floor obviously had a lot more cut tiles in it, so while Dad manned the tile saw, I laid the tile. We had a whole bunch of half tiles to cut out, plus there was the toilet flange and the water line for the toilet that we had to cut around. In hindsight, I realize now that everything actually went pretty well, but for some reason I had this constant feeling like I was screwing up or something wasn't going well. The results speak for themselves though.



Not bad for my first tile job, eh? I stood on it last night and everything felt good and solid! That made me happy. Kinda makes me want to put tile floors in the entire house...but that'll never happen.