Smile! It’s time for tile!

Woohoo!  Time for Phase 2 of bathroom redo!  Wow…that was a whole lotta rhyming, right there.
So cement board is down, time to lay the tile.  My dad (bless him) spent 2 hours figuring out exactly where to start the tile so that we maximized our tile (no waste!) and things ended against the tub and the door jam with whole tiles.  I really don’t know how he did it…but it worked.  First things first, after we he marked everything, we laid down our chalk lines.

See where the blue lines meet?  That’s the corner where all the tile gets started from.  Then it was just a matter of mixing the thin-set and laying down the first tile!  The thin set should be about the consistency of peanut butter….but we found that we liked it just a little bit thinner than that.  The big joke between my dad and I is that I’m extremely literal, so I asked “chunky or smooth peanut butter?”  I think it was a valid question…there IS a difference.

We also learned that if you are doing mosaic tile, it is ideal that you use a trowel with 1/4” grooves or less.  The one my dad is using is 1/4”…but we both agreed that 1/8” would have been better.  There was a lot of mud to clean out of the grooves.
I didn’t get a shot of the 1st tile because I was laying it, but I snapped a few quickies of my dad laying some others, hence the out of focus.  Oh and I just realized that I never showed a pic of the tile before!  Well here it is! It’s Daltile’s octagon and dot from Home Depot. 

Then Hunter thought it would be a good time to wake up.  He sat on my bed and ate some Teddy Grahams for a bit…but being that he is my son…he really wanted to get in there and help.  He became the tile handler, and he was serious about his job too.

We managed to finish all the whole tile sheets that day.  Wahoo!  A full day ahead of schedule!  Next up is cutting all the tiles!  Phew!