Phew! Tile is Finished

Wow, I thought installing tile was difficult. Grouting with two-part epoxy grout was even harder.

Thankfully, I asked my Dad to come and help with this part. If I had tried to take this on myself, I'm 100% positive it would have been an irreversible disaster. My first order of business was to clean the tile off as much as possible. There were still a few clumps of thinset stuck to the tiles and I didn't want those to get mixed in with the grout and discolor it or possibly compromise the water tight seal. After that, we decided we should go to Home Depot and pick up a couple items for the cleanup and hopefully find someone who had any tips of tricks for us installing this type of epoxy grout. We only accomplished the first part unfortunately. We couldn't find anyone at HD who'd used this product...of course.

So, we came back and watched YouTube! Not just any 'ole videos on YouTube though, we found an official installation video from the grout's manufacturer and watched it. We felt ready to have a go at it after that, sort of. We mixed up and used only one bucket at a time which proved to be about the only way it would work. The epoxy in this grout starts to set a lot faster than your typical grout. We had about 20-30 minutes of time where the grout was easy to work with and after that it'd get really sticky and would pull itself out of the grout lines if you weren't careful with the float. On top of that, you can't let this stuff sit on the face of the tile for too long otherwise it'd dry and become really tough to wipe clean. Since we were on a tight schedule and couldn't really take a break fatigue started becoming a problem, so Dad and I had to tag team on installing the grout and wiping down the tile. I'm not sure one thing was easier than the other, but it seemed to help.

After what seemed like 12 hours but was actually about 4 hours of grouting and simultaneously cleaning, we finished grouting the shower walls. By that time it was 3:30pm and we hadn't eaten lunch yet. We decided it was break time and asked Cass to run out and get a couple more buckets of the grout and some mineral spirits to help with cleaning up the excess grout that fell off the walls onto the shower floor before we could grout the floor. After our MUCH needed break, we got back to work and cleaned the shower floor as mentioned above and proceeded with grouting the floor. This, thankfully, proved to be much simpler than the shower walls though we still faced the same challenges with the grout setting quickly, getting sticky, and having to clean it up as we worked.

We finally finished with everything somewhere around 6ish, and it felt so good to be done that even as I write this, I'm breathing a sigh of relief just thinking about it. Afterward I almost felt sick from all the hard work. It felt to me like we'd taken the same amount of work I put into the tile of over the four day memorial weekend and condensed it into 8 hours. O_O I think that all that extra effort using epoxy grout will pay off though since we won't even have to seal it.

Many many thanks to my Dad for helping me out with this (and to Mom for lending him to me). There's no way I would have been so ambitious in our tile design if I didn't have every confidence that you'd help me accomplish this! We truly have something to be proud of because of your help. :-)

Check it out!








FYI, this isn't my last post about the bathroom remodel. We're not done, yet. :-( I still have finish work to do on the room itself like drywall mudding and painting, installing the shower door, bathroom light, and new toilet amongst a few other things, but let's be honest. The tile is really the main feature, right?!?! ;-) And it was the hardest part so I feel a real sense of accomplishment about it.

Tiling the Walls, Part 3

Spoiler alert! I'm finally done tiling!!!!! What an enormous undertaking. I wouldn't recommend taking on a project of this magnitude as your first tiling project.

I had to finish the crown pattern on the shower head wall and the shelf wall. After 4 days of straight tiling last weekend without being finished, you can imagine my disdain for tiling by this point. But my motivation was how close to being finished I finally was. Once I got this crown up, I could put the mortar away.





These were tricky because all four edges of the square recessed shelves are tapered inward so no matter how you install them, the shelf will drain. So, I had to cut the tiles with a slight taper, AND I had to be super precise when cutting the sides because they were going to be what held up the top tiles. CRAZY!


The last thing I had to do was put in the threshold. We found a nice tan(ish) colored marble threshold that, while the color doesn't match perfectly, we think looks really nice.




Alright, here's what you really want to see right? The semi finished product pictures! Obviously, they're not grouted yet, but they're done enough that you can really see what the shower will look like!















All I can say is, Phew! We couldn't be happier with how it looks.

Tiling the Walls, Part 2

Sunday

Cass and I went out to lunch with our friends who're moving to Rochester, NY. Hope your move went well, Dittys! We'll miss you guys.

I flew solo putting up the last two courses of 12"x12" tiles. So, without further ado...


Bought a paddle for mixing the mortar. WAAAY easier and faster than mixing it by hand.











Now, for the most exciting work from Sunday! I had to drill a hole in a tile big enough for the shower head pipe to fit through. After lunch, Cass and I stopped at Home Depot to see what sort of tools existed for such a job. We found this diamond grit hole saw.

Any time your cutting porcelain tile, the cutting area needs to stay wet. Otherwise the blade will either get too hot, or it'll seize up. So this little contraption came with a cup that you tape down to the tile and pour water into.


Then, you just kinda go at it with the drill and hole saw bit. The hole in the bottom of the cup is really close to the same diameter as the bit, so it was pretty easy to get the hole started.


Presto! Perfectly round hole for the shower head.


I had to twist the tile as I was putting the shower head pipe through the hole I just drilled because of where the hole was positioned on the tile.


Swabbing the excess mortar so it doesn't get all over the pipe.

After that I finished off that same course of tiles all the way around and with that, I was done putting up 12"x"12" tiles! Monday would be just working on the crown.

Monday

Time to work on the crown. Funny story about the crown. We had originally come up with a design that would have followed the brick pattern in the 12"x12" tiles. You can get an idea of what that design would've looked like in the 3D mockup I created at the beginning of the entire project. Because I started the bottom course of tiles in the wrong pattern, the crown design wouldn't have followed the brick pattern properly had we done what the illustration shows. So we had to come up with a new pattern that doesn't rely on the brick pattern. I'm actually glad we had that problem, because I like what we came up with as a workaround better than the original design. Not to mention it involved less cutting tiles! Cass gets the credit for the new design. Way to go babe!


I love using that paddle. It's so much easier!


Half way through the middle wall.


The main wall's crown almost finished!


Another funny story, similar to the beginning of Monday. After reexamining the dimensions of the interior of the recessed shelves, we realized that our initial plan of just using a sheet of the shower floor tile in there wouldn't work. So we came up with this design. Granted it was much more difficult to do and probably was the reason we didn't finish on Monday, we're really glad we did it.

More to come in Part 3!

Tiling the Walls, Part 1

Ok folks, lots and lots of pictures to share, so I'm breaking this up into three different posts. There probably won't be much in the way of reading for this one because it's basically a whole bunch of tiling and the only exciting thing about tiling is the result!

Friday

Memorial weekend turned into an all out tiling marathon for me. Before I could get started tiling the shower walls, I had to finish tiling the shower curb and the baseboards. So, I took the Friday before memorial day weekend off and did just that.

I wish I could say that I had a whole bunch of exciting stuff to tell you about, but I don't. So, this will be more of a photo gallery. Tiling tends to be long and I'd imagine very boring to watch. So I'll just post the photos and talk about them when there's a story behind it.





Cutting tile for the top of the curb.






Saturday

I was already aching from working on Friday, but I had a whole bunch of tiling to yet to do. So, Saturday, my Dad came over to help me out. We discussed our plans for a little while early in the day and got started laying out the grid on the walls for how we'd be tiling up the wall.








I know, nice right? This pretty much explains how I felt after 1 1/2 days of tiling.


Dad had to make a plunge cut for a couple of the tiles around the first recessed shelf. Tricky!


This is how far we got on Saturday. Obviously, there was a pretty fair amount of tiling yet to do.

More to come in Part 2!

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.