Some Forward Progress

My folks came out this past weekend to help with the bathroom, and we made great progress. The first step after demo is to put up cement backer board in the shower. It's a lot like sheetrock, but more irritating in every way imaginable. It's significantly heavier and harder to cut, and since it's denser it's harder to get the screws that hold it up set in enough that they won't catch on the trowel when laying the adhesive for the tile. After getting it up, I asked my mother (the queen of sheetrock) to take a sharpee and circle any screws that she thought needed to be set in deeper. You may notice that about half of the screw heads in the image linked have black circles around them...

We gave her a bit of a hard time about that, but when it came time to lay the wall tile it went very smoothly. In the other bathroom there had been a few places where we had to fiddle with the tile a little to accommodate screws that were not all the way in. On this project, we had no such cases. For the wall we used one inch square tiles, which come in foot square sheets. This was pretty easy to actually lay, but we spent a lot of time making sure that all of the rows and columns lined up, and a lot of little shifting to get things to line up was done. While I didn't love how much of that we had to do, I was very pleased with the final result.

Once the tile was allowed to set for twenty-four hours, it was grouting time. This is a task we have done several times before, and I actually find it to be fairly fun. It is time consuming, however, as there are a lot of little rest periods in the middle of it. The process is: mix the grout, let it rest ten minutes, then smear it on the walls into the spaces between the tiles, then let it sit thirty minutes, then sponge off the excess, then let it sit sixty minutes, then buff off the haze. Since once it sets it's hard to work with, most walls need to be done in sections in order to keep it workable. It leads to it being a long process, with lots of coffee breaks. Once the grout is in and set, the lines between the tiles are much less stark, so the huge field of inch square tiles blend. This makes what started out a bit busy look like a nice, soothing texture.

The last thing we did before the folks left was to tile the floor. These big square guys were super easy compared to all the little wall ones, and despite some places that needing cutting went down quickly. Such is the upside of putting foot square tiles in a twenty-five square foot space. There had been some discussion of laying these on an angle, making them diamond shape instead of square. In the end we decided to take the square route, and we are quite happy with the appearance. We have reached the stage in the project where there is a lull in the huge, obvious changes. We need to finish up the grouting on the walls and floor, then do several coats of sealer (which of course each have extended drying times.) We are hoping that we can get those steps, plus some painting done during the next weekend and work week, and then do the big installation the following weekend. Hopefully in two to three weeks, we will be done with the bathroom!