The Shop Floor: Installing the Tile

     So suddenly it is Friday and my Dad is here to help me with the floor.  I sort of feel bad for the man - he is a good Dad, and he offered because he wanted to be helpful, but I don't think that either one of use knew what we were getting into.  First of all, the floor was not level, and no one knew about that until I had stripped the carpet and all that jazz.  I should have poured a leveler or put a floating cement board floor underneath, but that is a discussion for a later time.  I was trying to make sure that I was ready for the help when I had it available.  Secondly, my Dad - bless his heart - doesn't always like to travel and be away from home, so when he saw the size of the room he realized that we could finish in a day and set himself to do it.  I could have, and should have, slowed things down but he is my Dad, and I just don't want to disappoint him.
      Truth be told, when it was all said and done, I was really glad that he was there helping me.  First of all, he had experience laying ceramic tile at work.  Secondly, he is a pretty handy guy.  Third, he showed me how to safely operate the tile saw, which I could do but I am had never used one before and I wouldn't have done it quite right without a little instruction first.  He helped me out a ton.  Actually, he did most of the work, grabbing the trowel and going to town.
      The first thing that we had to do was to mix the quickset.  That is the mortar that binds the tile to the floor.  We did this with a five gallon bucket and a special mixing attachment on a drill.  We used a corded, heavy duty drill that Traci's dad lent us and I was glad that we did because it would have been way too much for a normal drill to handle.  A portable battery drill would not have worked at all.  We did not measure the water like we should have, and I wished we would have.  We sort of did our best to mix it by eye, and I think that it turned out a little thin, which added to our troubles in the end.  Another tip: don't mix more mortar than you can use in like an hour or two.

Dad laying the first rows of tile. The baseline we created is at the right edge of the rows.

     So when it comes to actually laying tile, it is a fairly simple affair that is actually pretty complicated. Wait, what?  Here is the deal: it seems like it is fairly simple, but there are a lot - A LOT - of ways to do it wrong.  The first thing that we did was to set a base line.  If you are absolutely sure that your walls are straight, or if you are doing a small area, you can just use a couple of walls as baselines and start in a corner, but we were doing a big room and I knew for a fact that the walls were not straight.  So we measured to the center of the room , snapped a chalk line the long way, and we were ready to go.  I wish we would have measured the room the other way and did a baseline in the middle of it as well, but I don't know that that would have made much of a difference.  Once we snapped the chalk line, we just used the special notched trowel to put some mortar down and started setting down the tiles.

A little less than halfway through the process.

     My dad was doing all the hard work laying the tiles, and I was doing the fetching and the cutting.  Because there are a lot of crazy corners and uneven walls, we weren't measuring, we were using a different technique to get the tiles cut correctly.  When you come to where you know you will have to cut a tile, you take a full tile and lay it down on the last full tile you set.  Then you take a third tile, and set it on top of that one but up against the corner or wall or whatever.  You use a pencil to mark where the top tile ends on the middle one, and that is where you cut.  It gives you a tile cut exactly to the contour of the wall or corner or whatever.  It is hard to explain but you can see it by clicking here. It is actually a pretty cool concept.

Me working at the wet saw.  I wasn't using the guard (dangerous and stupid idea!) so my shirt got totally drenched.

     And so we went, on and on, working our way across the room, down the hall, and into the corners, until the entire room was tiled.  In some of the really complicated corners, instead of making a really complicated cuts, we cut the tile into small little pieces.  For instance - instead of cutting a tile into an "L" shape to go around a corner we would cut two pieces to make it go around.  In retrospect I wish we hadn't done this, and had taken the time and care to make it be one piece, just for asthetics.  But we did what we did.  The other thing that happened as we went along was that we sort of discarded the use of spacers.  The spacers are little plastic pieces that look like an "x" that you put on the corner of the tiles to make them evenly spaced across the floor.  We were using them for a time, but the uneveness of the floor made them somewhat ineffective.  The corners of the tiles would ride up on top of them and screw up the spacing time and time again.  Eventually they were more trouble than they were worth and we just got rid of them.

All done, except for the grout.  It looks hooker good at this point: good from 20 feet but a little rough up close.

     Soon we were done.  In fact, we finished the entire basement area in like five hours, which seemed a little fast to me.  That should have been my first clue.  I would expect a professional to finish it in that amount of time maybe, but not two guys who didn't have much in the way of experience.  Also, as we worked and had to walk on some of the areas some of the tiles began to crack almost immediately.  That should have been my second clue that something was wrong.  But we let it set and went to dinner.  Dad was leaving the next morning, and I was going to be on my own to grout once the tile had set for 24 hours.