Floor Tile Progress

What. A. Weekend!

Sorry for the tardiness of this post but my, oh my have things been busy around here! Remember how I mentioned that my dad was taking three days off last week to come up, help us finish the shower and then do the floor tiles? Well, change of plans. It took the entirety of those three days to finish the shower alone so the floor tile wasn't started until this weekend. On Saturday, the bathroom got all cleaned out. No more accent stuff in the corner. See ya' later tile saw. Well, the tile saw actually just got moved to the sunroom but whatevs. So, the entire bathroom was clean and then the work began...

Step 1: Butterin' yer joints!

Using this tape that looks like sheetrock tape but totally isn't and some mud, my dad went over all of the hardie backer joints on the floor so the tile would have a nice, even place to lay.

Step 2:

We let that dry for almost an hour and then came the task of making the room square.

See, we have an almost square room with the exception of the little place where the wall goes back into the shower so, armed with a measuring tape, a chalk box and some hairspray, we set out to turn the room into a nice, easy to tile square. If you remember from the shower, you're going to divide your room into quadrants and tile them one at a time with the help of a ledger strip.

Remember how I said we had some hairspray? Well, neat factoid: if you want your chalk lines to stay put while you walk around all over them, just give 'em a little hairspray. We used Mega Hold : )

Step 3: Lay out your tile

This step, I didn't get too many great pictures of because I had to put my camera downa and help. You might have noticed in previous pictures that we're doing a black tile border around the room. Well, what we had to do because we couldn't just get sheets of black hex tiles was buy a few boxes of white with black in them and then go back and pop out the black ones one by one. Then, you lay them on your white tiles and when everything looks right, you, your husband, your mom and your dad all sit on the floor at 8 o'clock on a Saturday night and pluck them out and plunk in the black ones. Fascinating stuff, huh? Those white ones you plucked out will go back in the spots where the black ones were missing from the first sheets. Any questions? No? Good.

Step 4: Stickin' the tile to the floor (finally)

I mentioned earlier that the floor is divided into four sections. Working from the middle out and using your ledger strips as a guide you can start putting your tile down once you've got your mortar on the floor. So, this is as far as it got. I love it and I can't stop going in and imagining what the whole floor will look like! Unfortunately, it may be a while until things get rolling on it again since we're hosting Hanksgiving at our house this year and I should really be cleaning/decorating/taking stock of what dishes I have and what ones I will need to borrow from mom. I'll leave you with this pretty picture of the tile border in all of its sharp, high contrast glory.

And this picture of the tree we put in our dining room last night.

One tree decorated, one to go! Wish us luck!

Happy holidays home improvers!