Bathroom Tile Project: Day 3 "Tile Installation"

    My sister's idea for the title of this post was Day 3: "Party in the Bathroom Tile USA featuring Tiley Cyrus".   Other ideas brainstormed were "The Tile High Club", "Goin' a Tile a Minute", "Tile 'n Out", and "The I-tile-ian Job".   Or what about "Tiler Perry's Big Fat Tilin' Barbeque Weekend"?

After the jump you can see all of the ups and downs of day three.  Finally, we are seeing some progress!

    One of the things that drove me crazy about the previous tile was the fact on both walls (both by the tub and the long wall) had uneven rows of tile.  It seemed like they picked an arbitrary spot to start tiling and then worked their way to the walls.  We decided that avoiding this was a priority.  We laid out tile and used the tub as a starting point.

    Then we drew a line where the end of the sheet fell.  Since we didn't want to tile ourselves back into a corner, we started at the corner of the tub and worked backwards.   To tile successfully, it is important to scrape the mastic with an 1/8" V-grooved trowel.  It puts just the right amount of material down that you won't have it bubbling up through sheets of tile.

    Tiling is fun and not that bad.  It was just getting to this step that was such a pain in the booty.  Here is an action shot.  During this time, we realized that the floor wasn't totally level.  It was too late to turn back now. (I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love...with this tile.)

    When we got to the toilet and radiator pipe, a razor worked to cut away the tiles to make a nice fit.

    Oh yeah!  Look at that.  He must be a professional!

    One of the problems that spent a lot of time working on today was cutting the tile.  The tile was too thick to score and snap or use snips on.  It was too small to use a wet saw.  It broke apart when we used the grinder.  The solution we tried was using a hacksaw to cut the tile at a snail's pace.  We had to cut about 30 tiles and each cut took about 5 minutes.  Ugh.  In the end, we just used the grinder and had about a 80% success rate.  The speed of the cut made it worth it.

During the time that we were taking turns laying tile and going to stores looking for ways to cut tile, we also managed to strip and repaint the bathroom door as well as spray paint the radiator a lovely glossy white.

     The whole tile laying process took longer than expected, per usual.  Right around 5:30pm, I realized that there wasn't enough tile. Womp, womp.

    Mike raced down to the Tile Outlet and got there with two minutes to spare.  Unfortunately, the boxes were all mixed up there and we ended up with non-polished marble hexagon tile when we needed polished hexagon tile. Poor guy.  It turned out to be okay because our mastix was hardening and not really adhering the tile very well. (More on that problem in tomorrow's post)

    So this is where we ended Day 3.

On the schedule for Day 4:  Grout, finish laying tile, rehang the door, put the toilet back, reset the sink, put the radiator back, adhere the border tile, and put a line of caulk around the edges.  That's not much...