Floor and Wall Tile

During the building process I have been the general contractor, in charge of supervising all of the work, have completed some of the tasks myself, and have done bits and pieces of other tasks, but the biggest job I took on was installation of floor and wall tile. All of that kneeling and getting up and down might mean that tiling is a young man's game, but I figured that if I took my time I could do it all.

Flora and I both really like tiled floors, as much for their ability to take a beating as for their appearance (and our Rottweilers can be rough on a floor). So we made the decision to tile every room except for the master bedroom and the upstairs loft, which would both be done in hardwood. I knew that my slow pace would hold up the job so I was anxious to get started as soon as I could but I wanted to wait until as much of the finish carpentry and paint as possible were complete before I started putting down tile.

Before any tile could be installed, all floors that were to be tiled had to be covered with cement backer board. This material is essentially 1/2" thick sheets of concrete, which are very heavy. They have to be cut to size and cemented to the subfloor with thinset and then secured with screws or nails every few inches. The material is difficult and messy to cut and did I mention that it is very heavy. Fortunately Mario helped me with this part of the job, which ended up taking parts of several weeks to accomplish.

The Master Bath

I was finally able to start tiling the master bathroom floor in December. We had to match floor tile color with the already-installed custom-poured shower pan and with the granite vanity top that had been selected but had yet to arrive. With all of the angles and doorways to trim around, cutting and laying tile required several days. I laid the 12 inch tiles on a 45 degree diagonal, which proved to be a lot of work but ended up looking great.

This is also one of the floors that has hot water tubes running underneath, so the tiles and shower pan will be warm under our feet when we use this room on cool days.

A bigger job yet was tiling the shower. I had never done wall tiles or tiled a ceiling before. Working overhead is pretty tough on these old inflexible joints, especially my neck, so I could not work too many hours a day. I decided to tile the ceiling, the toughest job of all but I wanted the shower to have the cave-like appearance. Creating shampoo and soap cubbyholes also involved a lot more work than I had anticipated. One big problem was that the little slate pieces that create the dark bands around the room tended to delaminate when they got wet on the saw so many of them had to be re-cut and replaced.

I installed Ditra over the cement backboard on all of the surfaces inside the shower and then sealed all joints with Kerdi-band to ensure that everything was waterproof. It was probably overkill, but by the time I was ready to tile, it ensured everything was rigid and waterproof.

In the end, all of the colors and textures blended well and the warm solar water-heated tile floors are luxurious.

The Upstairs Bath

Next, it was on to the upstairs bathroom. I had both 12-inch and 6-inch tiles so I was able to create a little more interesting pattern.

This room went really fast and looked great until the carpenter who was doing the adjoining hardwood floor left too big a gap between my already-installed tile and the hardwood. This meant that I had to go back and add a tiny strip of tile to reach the transition strip, a situation I really wanted to avoid. This turned out to not be the  last bad decision the guy would make and I might have been better off had I fired him then and there. All in all though the room turned out well and the floor blended well with the rest of the room.



The Guest Bedroom

I had selected a wonderful tile for this room that had all of the positive attributes of natural stone (travertine) with none of travertine's issues. I decided to inset 6-inch tile diagonally between the 12-inch tiles. This meant that before I could begin I had to precisely cut a corner off of every tile that would be installed in the room. This added about 8-hours of sawing, but the affect was dramatic and well worth the effort.

This room receives abundant afternoon sun and the color of the flooring enhances the yellow paint we used on the walls. This would turn out to be my favorite room.

The Office

In contrast to the previously-completed guest bedroom, the floor in this room turned out to be my least favorite in the house. The tile is mostly off-white with some small specks and streaks of color. A standard checkerboard pattern adds to the boredom. Suffice it to say that the fllor is done, should hold up well, and will be fine for an office floor.

The Powder Room

By this point in the project, with four rooms completed,  my knees were killing me (it really is a young man's game) and I was looking forward to doing something other than tile for a while. Since this bathroom was located right next to the master bathroom, with its diagonal pattern, Flora thought it best to use a simple checkerboard in this room. These were gorgeous tiles, brown with little streaks of blue, and we matched them with robin's-egg blue wall paint. The tile work went quickly and the effect is nice. Here, I also got to install my first marble transition strip between this room and the tile in the hallway.



Entryway

One of the things we that quickly became routine every time we went to Lowes (which was about 4x a week there for a few months) was to stroll through the flooring department and see what was stacked on or under the closeout table. One of the things we picked up months ago was the a stack a 12" x 24" granite tiles for the entryway and coat closet. They were not particularly inexpensive at $7 each, but they were very nice and I thought that a large format natural stone made a statement as a visitor enters the door and walks into the greatroom. With such large stones I also used wider (3/8") grout lines (the bedrooms and bathrooms all had 1/4" grout lines). The wider grout lines also carried over into the great room. The entryway is separated from the great room by another of those black marble transition strips that is embedded between them.

The Kitchen

The beige kitchen tiles were again placed in a checkerboard pattern, square with the house. The tiles had rippled uneven edges, which made it impossible to use spacers like I had relied on in previous rooms. I still question the wisdom of using such a  light grout in a kitchen, but Flora sealed it twice so only time will tell.











Kitchen Backsplash

The little marble subway tiles I used in this application were problematic from the outset. They arrived glued to a mesh substrate, which made me think it would be an easy installation, but once I put them through the wetsaw the glue began to dissolve and the tiles on the wall that had gotten wet would begin to slide down the wall, forcing me to stick little 1/16" to 1/8" thick spacers  between each tile to locate them correctly. Also, many of the tiles were misaligned on the sheets or broken or chipped. All in all it was kind of a mess and took a lot of extra time, but after everything was grouted it did not look too bad.

The Greatroom

Finally, knees protesting more than ever, I got to the greatroom. I think we paid more for these tiles than for all of the tiles in the rest of the house and oh how I looked forward to seeing them in place.  So even with the aches and pains that came from all of the previous work, I looked forward to doing this room more than any other.

The format of the tile cried out for using a herringbone pattern and I jumped at the chance, even though figuring out the layout was a little intimidating to begin with. I worked for almost a full week to lay and grout the 600 square feet of tile (with a little help with the grouting) but the result was more than worth the trouble. The first thing I noticed was how warm the tiles got when the sun was shining on them, just as predicted. I have to admit that I had been disappointed that the more lightly-shaded subflooring in our passive solar room did not heat up much on sunny days. But now, with the much darker tiles in place, it was a different story. In a passive-solar room such as this, the sun heats the floor during the day and then radiates that heat in the evening.

Now that all of the tiling in the house is complete and grouted, I can install the baseboard and call back the painters to finish up, which is one of the last things to do before it is time to move in.