We'd like to share with you one of the many things that have been keeping us from updating our blog recently. We call it The Great Tile Project - with the word "Great" indicating a sense of "long and arduous", rather than "impressive or of high quality".
It all started not too long after Emma broke her arm when Leslie called me at work to say that we needed to get a hold of our landlord because our bathroom was flooding (I won't go into the gory details). Half of said landlord team rushed home from work and tried to help the other half of said landlord team mop up the mess with towels (there were SOME good things about renting, we now realize).
After conducting perhaps ill-advised tests to determine the cause (involving running all the sinks and flushing all the toilets at once, and then mopping up the mess with towels again) and asking questions of more knowledgeable landlords, we paid a plumber $80 to come to our house for 20 minutes to remove the roots that had grown into our sewer pipe (along with a baby wipe or two; who flushed those down the toilet?).
The previous owners of the house had installed some self-stick vinyl tiles in the bathroom that we had never been really fond of and wanted to replace at some point. Seeing as several of them had now lost their self-stickiness, and we were worried about the water that had gotten underneath them, we decided that it was as good a time as any to redo the flooring. So, armed with a flat-head screwdriver and a hair dryer I pulled up all the vinyl tiles to reveal the originally white terrazzo tiles underneath. Because a significant amount of glue didn't want to come up with the vinyl tiles, we had to lay some of them back down to have some "stepping stones" to get around in the bathroom.
A day or two later I borrowed some tools from a friend and chipped out all of the terrazzo tile with an hammer and chisel (the stones in those can really fly!). I thought that would be the hard part until I realized that the real work was getting rid of all the leftover mortar underneath. Luckily I complained about it enough that someone at work offered to lend me their 5.5 hp compressor with air chisel and grinder. Here's a shot of the cleaning crew before the work:
And after (notice the decrease in size of the work crew):
It quickly became apparent that chiseling and grinding mortar was going to make a big mess, so we covered as much as we could with plastic sheeting, including the door to the bathroom. That meant that I got to crawl in and out of the bathroom window. Since the bathroom is right next to Talmage's room and no 5.5 hp gasoline motor is very quiet, another result of using the compressor was that forever after, when Talmage would see it in the garage he would emphatically say, "Daddy youd! Daddy youd!"
We had a bare cement floor in the bathroom for quite a long time while we looked at different tile at Lowes and the local tile store. Because it was such a good deal, we finally decided on some 16" travertine (a natural stone) tile. I used PowerPoint to create a half-scale model of the tile pattern we had come up with (the other engineers at work had to laugh at me for that).
We slowly came to realize that for our first experience with tile, we were sure making it difficult on ourselves - natural stone tile usually has thin grout lines (we used 1/16") that don't hide mistakes very well, and a diagonal pattern with a border means a lot of cutting (especially since everything had to come from the same 16" tiles; no border pieces premade) - but there was no turning back or settling for something less at that point. After planning and planning and planning until I was blue in the face, I finally got up the courage to start laying tile. Leslie was my beautiful backbuttering assistant. Here are the first four tiles on the main diagonal (we only got to put in two tiles in the entire bathroom that were not cut with a wet saw; the wood is filling the space that will be used for the border tiles):
And here are some more tiles put into place:
All the tiles finally laid - what a relief!
After laying the tiles we applied enhancing sealer and then grouted and then resealed the tiles along with the grout.
Then I borrowed a nailer for the air compressor and put the baseboards back in, then caulked all around and put the toilet back in. We finally moved back into the bathroom on Saturday.
I'm happy to say that everything turned out well in the end, and I'm rather proud of our tiling job, but I don't think I'll be doing it again any time soon.
POST EDIT : A big thank you goes to Nate's Dad who came in and took over as assistant. He did such a great job helping Nate during his Thanksgiving "vacation". Thanks Steve, we couldn't have done it with out your superior know-how and tireless efforts.
