By mid-May, approximately a month after I started our bathroom renovation project, I was finally ready to tile.
My first tiling endeavor was to tile the floor. I started by installing the ditra de-coupling membrane, which added a thin layer below the tile.
Next, I carefully figured out what my straight line would be, starting with my hallway “straight line” and checking to see whether that would look straight within the bathroom. I had to make some small adjustments but eventually found a “straight” line for my tile.
I started at the door threshold, as I wanted to make sure that my hallway floor was perfectly flush with the bathroom tile.
Tiling the floor was relatively easily and moved quickly. I got the entire floor tiled within one day. But because I started at the door, I eventually trapped myself in the room and had to do some fun aerobatics to escape without stepping on the wet tiles.
Right after the floor was done, I moved on to the wall, starting with my dark tiles.
I made a quick template to show where my tiles and grout line would be so I could move it around on the wall and see how it lined up with the toilet button, sink faucet and shower features. Once I was happy with a starting height, I screwed a piece of wood into the wall so I had a starting point. It wasn’t perfectly straight (because of the wood), but I used shims to make sure my first line was straight. It took about 2 weeks total, or 4 full working days, to get the entire wall (outside of the shower area) done.
Once the wall was done, I spent a lot of time (about an hour) removing the excess thinset from between the tiles and then grouted the wall with black grout. I was careful to protect the floor and the wall from the grout, but it still got everywhere. Once the grout was on, I spent about 2 hours removing the excess grout and making sure there wasn’t a haze on the tiles. It was stressful but I finally got it to a point where the tiles were clean!
Before continuing with my tile, I took a break from tiling to get the wood shelf made and installed in the wall so we could advance with the toilet installation. More on that here.
Next, I moved on to tiling the shower walls, starting with the dark tile. Although I had some difficult hole saw cuts to make, the real trouble was cutting angled tiles around the niche so I had nice, mitered cuts. Getting the cuts accurate and not chipping the tiles was the biggest challenge. I found a great video online where the contractor explained how she would cut the tile on the wet saw to the right size and then cut a straight line 1/16″ below the edge of the tile with an angle grinder, and then go at it again to cut the angle. I basically followed this advice, except that once I had half of the tile cut through, I would flip it over and cut from the back to fully protect the edge. I then used a diamond sanding pad to clean up the edges so I didn’t have any small chips from the wet saw.
It took me 3 1/2 days of tiling to get the wall completed, and another 3 hours to clean the thinset and grout the wall.
With the black grout behind me, I then cleaned the floor and grouted the floor tiles with ‘warm gray’. It was much easier, with gravity on my side. The grout looked a lot darker than I expected when it first went on, but after a couple of hours it dried to a much lighter colour and matched the tile perfectly.
Next I moved on to the shower wall tile, starting with the niche wall first since I knew it would be the hardest and most time-consuming.
It took me about 4 days to get the full wall done, including both sections of the niche. Next time I’ll do a full-length shower shelf with a pre-cut stone piece (like in our basement shower) instead of this niche nonsense.
Similar to the other side, I also installed a Schluter edge piece on the outside of the shower wall. Each of the tiles butting against the edge had to be cut at an angle as well. At least by now I was a pro and could cut through those tiles relatively quickly.
After finishing the niche wall, I grouted it to make some progress when I couldn’t tile. The grout was lighter than I expected, but still a good match to the tile.
Finally, I moved on to the window wall, which took me about 3 full days of tiling (spread out over just over a week). To give myself a break from all the angled cuts, I focused on the main portion of the wall first and did as many full tiles as I could, leaving the window until the last. Once I got to the window, I had a decent system for cutting angled tiles and found some efficiency – especially since there were so many same-sized cuts to make.
Once all the tiles were installed, I grouted the light tiles with ‘frost’ colour grout and finished caulking all the seams.
I was extremely happy to be done all my tiling work! All in all, it took just under 2 months from start to finish and about 15 days of dedicated tiling time.