What I have learned about myself today: sometimes, when I’m trying to measure something, even if I’m being careful, I can somehow suddenly end up being off by two entire inches for no clear reason at all, and then can add 3 to 56, get 59, but get off another inch as I’m trying to measure those three inches. I’m not sure how these things happen. It’s possible that I’m dumb! But if I’m dumb I’m at least dumb enough that I caught it and fixed it (pay attention to black, not orange) before it mattered to anyone.
Note that “before it mattered to anyone” technically means “ever,” since those walls that I’ve written on are getting torn down and then an actual professional is doing the tiling. But it occurred to us that we ought probably to have a real idea of how we were going to put the tile on the wall before we start paying some dude to come over and do it for us– since, again, I cannot be trusted.
The actual tiles are at the bottom of the post. We’re using the white glossy ceramic with the greyish-blue marbling as the main shower tile, and it’s going almost all the way up the wall, to where you can see the little black line with the arrows on it– or, possibly, a bit above that, if we add a row of narrower beveled tiles above the bigger ones. The actual tiles are the same style as the one in the picture but are 10″ x 14″. We’ll probably put a row of those smaller ones on the outside row just to make it look less abrupt– much like the current tub does.
The bulkhead you see there is going to be gone, and we’re putting in a new ceiling fan powered by the tears of children. We’re not planning on tiling the shower ceiling; that’ll all be paint, although we haven’t settled on a color yet. Still working on that.
The black line with the wavy bit in it is going to be accent tile– the glass tile you see down below, cut into four rows so that each section of tile actually gets us four feet of the accent row. We may or may not use more of it as a little backsplash between the vanity and the mirror; we haven’t gotten that far yet and aren’t sure how it’ll look in the end. The third, darker tile is the floor– we bailed on the cork idea once we determined that we absolutely had no choice but to retile the shower surround; if we’re paying a professional to come in anyway we may as well lay tile on the floor. I still like the cork idea but this is less risky. The orange wavy parts are slightly-mismeasured other ideas about where to put the accent row; I think the black is the actual final decision, although it’ll end up being off by a tiny bit since I didn’t bother to account for 1/8 of an inch or so of grout between each of the tiles. It’s slightly above my eye level, which is about where I wanted it, and is high enough that it’s unlikely that it’s going to get a lot of water splashed on it (since this’ll be a high-grout area) which was what my lovely wife wanted. Plus at that height we don’t have to have any of the bigger tiles cut to put it there– it’ll slide in nicely between, if I remember right, the third and fourth row.
I may push for floor heating, since the actual floor space in the room is so small I can’t imagine it’ll cost much. Don’t tell my wife yet.(*)
(Oh, hey, wait! I looked it up and it’s not that expensive for a small area. Hmm.)
At any rate, the next step is to wait for Installer Dude to come by and measure everything for reals, which is happening… tomorrow, I think? And then we actually buy all the tile and break a bunch of shit and possibly need a plumber for behind the wall (I’m crossing my fingers that this doesn’t happen) and then do some cement boarding and then bring him back to actually do the tiling work. Or maybe we do that even before we schedule him to come back; I dunno, but we decided that we weren’t breaking anything until he’d measured and we had a sense of what sort of lead time they needed to schedule the job.
I’m looking forward to the “breaking stuff” phase. We were gonna do that this weekend but ended up deciding it was stupid timing. No use destroying the bathroom before it’s necessary, right? Sure.
Enjoy what’s left of your Labor Day weekend, folks. And thank a union member for making sure you have days off at all. Or, better yet, become one.
(*) Of course she reads this. You still don’t get to tell her.
I’m actually moderately more impressed by the destruction than the completed work. Other than a couple of slightly dodgy joins– that wall on the left that you can’t see really well was a *bitch*– this actually went pretty well, if messy and somewhat longer than I expected, but I expected it to last longer than I expected, if that makes any sense. I’m mostly posting this so you can see how effectively I’ve destroyed my bathroom, which I now have to get cleaned up before my son gets home and starts having to breathe concrete dust into his lungs. I figure that might be bad. This is actually the best picture of the work, because it’s so hard to get a good angle on that back wall, but you can see it in the mirror.
Here you can get a look at the bad joins on the left side, there– I think they’ll be OK once I put some mortar into them. If not, I’ll just sell the house. That wall turned out to be out of… plumb, I think? There’s three joists over there and the third one in the middle is slightly bulgier than the other two, which gave me hell, and plus the tub itself is unlevel so even finding a good starting point was hell. Plus that’s the wall I had to restructure so that I had something to attach the board to. I’m lucky that the only problems are a couple of slight gaps. I’m gonna have my father-in-law check my work before tiling, though. And oh holy hell am I not looking forward to doing the wall with the faucet on it.
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