The Tub Tile

So I hope you who are readn' this, have as much fun as we did doin' it.

Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).



A few weeks ago... (does five count as a few?) We had just got a repair/maintenance done on the Sunfire, and it turned out to be quite a pretty penny. Jenn was not exactly happy about the bill as we hadn't expected a bill half as much as the one we got. Anyway, to cheer her up, I gave her my big hammer and let her go to town on the existing tile around the tub. Now, Jenn and I had been seriously talking about doing the bathroom for a while, and so this wasn't as spontaneous as it may sound. Anyway, in a couple of hours, I had a happy wife and a trashed bathroom. A good trade!





Next step we figured was to take out the existing vanity and mirror. Who on earth ever decided that those puke-pink sinks and toilets were a good idea? (Incidentally, we have a very attractive Pink sink and vanity with matching disgustingly ugly mirror that we could be persuaded to part with for the right price!) Up until now, the demolition was pretty easy.

My next project was to get the piping ready for the new tub and shower fixtures that Jenn had picked out. The plumbing behind the shower wall was all soldered. I have been quite afraid of soldered plumbing, as I have almost no experience with it, plus the fact that I hate plumbing in general. This was a very intimidating stage in our project. My Dad sent up a soldering torch and I went and got a bunch of soldering connectors and pipe. The demo turned out to be quite difficult. The old soldered connections into the existing fixture did not come apart very easily. I ended up using my pipe cutter and made some rather ugly cuts, but once the old fixture was out, I was able to clean up the pipe ends fairly easily. By the end of the demo, I wasn't even close to having the fittings back to a point where I could turn the water back on (there wasn't any local turn off to the shower water). Luckily, I had bought these cool little pipe ends call Sharkbite Connectors
These just push on and there is a little tool to take them off. Anyway, I was able to turn the water back on and then finish the job the next day. The actual soldering turned out to be not that hard either. I have been told that the secret is to have clean ends.

Now that the piping was finished my next project was to get my tile backer up. I opted to use Hardy Board instead of Cement board. It is a little bit more expensive, but it is well worth the dollar difference as it is easy to cut (I just used my utility knife) and is more durable (I've been told). This went pretty well. The toughest part of the job was cutting the existing board to get a straight edge to butt my new board against. The actual hanging of the Hardy Board didn't take all that long.

At this point we were ready to hang the tile. I got a extra lite mortar that is made especially for wall tile applications and we got a bunch of different tiles to try a few different pattern ideas. Jenn preferred a square grid design and I liked an offset row look. We worked a row of a darker color tile in a six inch size into both patterns.


Let me know what you think.

So Jenn posted the two patterns on a couple of her online message boards to get a little input from some others. One lady mentioned that a diagonal pattern might look quite nice so Jenn fiddled around with the tiles for a bit and found a pattern that both of us thought definitely looked the best.



But, although I thought it looked great, I wasn't sure that I could pull it off. It seemed to me to be very complicated. But who can say no to Jenn when you can tell she really wants something. Anyway, I played with the pattern a bit, made some preliminary cuts and went to work. I quickly found out that my fears of the difficulty of getting this pattern to look right were well founded. About halfway through, I noticed that my grout lines were definitely getting more and more uneven, with a couple of them really distractingly big. However, we pushed on and it didn't seem to be too terribly bad. All the walls had similar difficulties. The soap shelf was especially difficult. Over a two week period, I finally got all the tile up.



Yesterday we finished the tile off by putting in the grout. The tile has a kind of feathered edge, and a somewhat tumbled look to it, so after the grout was all in, the grout lines I was stressing about are pretty much unnoticeable... Thank heaven for grout! The only real problem we now have with the grout is that it is a lot lighter than what it is supposed to be. So, hopefully we can figure out how to make the grout darken to the color it is supposed to be.

So I'm tired of typing and I doubt anyone actually made it through all that rambling... We will have more updates to come, hopefully soon..

And we'll get a picture of the finished product out soon... its late.