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.

The Shop Floor: Removing the Carpeting

I wish that we hadn't gotten rid of the carpet.  I am not sorry that we had taken it out of the basement, because we had to, but I wish we would have kept it and found a way to use it somehow, because it was a really nice carpet.  Really nice.  It was a little older, but it was a high quality product and it was like walking on a comfortable gym mat without all the dried wrestler sweat and shoe marks.  I would have liked to use it somewhere in some capacity or at least found someone who could have used it because it really was pretty nice, aside from the cat puke stain and paint flecks we let get on it because we knew it was going away.

     As it were, we had determined early on that the carpet wasn't totally glued down all throughout the room, which was a really good thing because that would have caused a ton of extra work.  One of the things about doing a tile floor on existing cement is that you can't have any adhesive or paint on the cement because it effects the bonding of the quickset that holds the tile to the floor.  So had the carpet been adhered at spots all around the room there would have been a lot of scraping to be done.  The easiest way to determine this is to go to a lot of random spots around the carpet and trying to lift it up.  if it lifts you are in business, and it is okay if it sticks around the edges. 

The basement before carpet removal.  Notice the painting is done and we allowed paint to spill on the carpet because we knew that we were going to remove the carpet.

     Removing the carpet was easy, okay?  Really easy.  I just started in a corner and I began pulling.  That's not true.  I actually began in the hallway because that was the one place where I needed to make a cut, and to be honest I screwed it up.  I cut with a straight edge exactly along the place where I wanted the carpet to stop and the floor to begin, which was right under where the door would be.  Wrong move.  I am not going to include this in the "lessons learned" section because it is a small thing: cut it so there is more carpet than you want, because you don't know what is underneath and you can always trim some.  In my case, I cut it a little bit short and I found out that I just missed a joint in the tacking strips, which would have been the perfect place to cut it.

The hallway: where it all began.

But I cut it.  I used a normal, everyday utility knife, what I grew up calling an Exact-o knife.  And I went slowly because I didn't know what I would fine under the carpet.

     What I found was all the signs of professional installation. The carpet itself was covering a typical carpet pad, the kind that is sort of mottled and doesn't even come out cleanly.  The carpet was held down by some of those wooden tacking strips with a million billion nails facing upward so that the carpet weave just sticks to them, and the strips themselves were nailed into the concrete with those masonry nails that are installed by essentially shooting them into the concrete with a .22.  The pad was inside of the strips and was glued down to the floor just around the edges.

A couple of images of what I found under the carpet.  In the top photo you can clearly see the carpet, pad, and tacking strips.  Below, a close up of the strips showing the heavy-duty masonry nails.  The duct tape is where there is a cut in the pad from when it was originally installed, but you can see in the top of the bottom picture that my cut missed the joint in tacking strips by an inch or two.

     What really made my heart sink when I ripped the first bits of carpet and padding up from the hallway was that the floor was painted.  It was painted with the same thick grey paint that covers the floor in my laundry/utility room, and I was not impressed.  The problem is that the quickset mortar that one uses to attach tile to a concrete floor generally doesn't adhere well to paint.  One of two things usually happens: either the mortar won't adhere to the paint, or the paint flakes off the concrete eventually so the tiles don't set right.  There are two ways to remedy this situation: lay a cement-board floor over the existing concrete, or completely scrape and sand the paint off.  I was not looking forward to that, because I didn't have the cash on had to get the relatively expensive cement board, and I didn't feel like being on my hands and knees scraping the entire basement.

The painted hallway floor, with carpeting still on the floor in the main room.

     So that is what I found, and I immediately began to remove it, and this is where I sort of have some regrets.  In order to make it easier for me to remove and haul away, I decided to cut up the carpet into squared and bind them with twine or whatever.  I wish I would have just rolled it up and found a use for it, or saved it for another time.  That is the deeply repressed hoarder inside of me peeking out, I guess.  Anyway, I cut the carpet into squares, pulled them off the tacking strips and floor, and ripped up the padding underneath.  The padding, where it was glued down, stuck.  But under the bulk of the room was a nice surprise: an unpainted floor.

In the process of removing the carpet, notice the carpet, the pad, and the bare floor with no paint.

     That was big.  I found no paint.  What I hypothesize - and there is no real way to test this - is that at one time the basement was configured differently than it is now.  Currently we have a main room into which the stairs and the outside door lead, and then looking at the stairs to the left there is a utility and laundry room where the furnace, water heater, etc. is located, and to the right there is the above mentioned hallway, which leads to a bathroom and a non-bedroom (because it doesn't have an escape window).  I believe that the "bedroom" and bathroom were later additions, and that historically the basement only had two rooms - the main finished room which today is the shop, and the a giant utility room that took up half the basement.  Hence the fact that the paint stopped at the end of the hallway.  I was relieved.
    What I did find in lieu of paint on the floor in the main room was a very evident pattern of squares - 12" by 12" - the exact size of the tile I was to be putting down.  I told Jim about it and he asked if the pattern was in a sort of yellow looking stuff.  As you can see in the photo below it clearly is.  He told me that there was probably asbestos tile down there are one point, and what I was seeing was the leftover bits of the underside of the tile and the adhesive used to adhere them to the floor.  Take a look:


The pattern on the main room floor, showing where there used to be asbestos tiles - which was common for the age of the house.



    The next big issue that I had, once I started pulling up the carpet and pad, was the tacking strips the surrounded the room where the carpet used to be attached, and the pieced of pad that were still sticking to the floor.  Getting the tacking strips up was easy enough: a pry bar wedged under them with a hammer usually broke them up and they came right off.  But the nails wouldn't come out.  You can usually break those nails off right at the floor with a small sledge hammer, or even a regular hammer, if you hit them just right.  Usually.  Well, this house seems to be unusual, and I guarantee you that I wasn't hitting them right, and the first couple that I tried resulted in big chunks of concrete coming up with them.  So I just borrowed an angle grinder from Jim and ground them off - over a hundred of them - down to level with the concrete.

     The pad that was stuck to the floor came of even more easily with a simple scraper, and the scraper did the trick on the bulk of the rest of the stuff on the floor.  The scraping was the longest part, in fact.  I spent three nights after work scraping on that floor, and I still didn't get it as clean as I wanted it.  But it was doable.  The paint proved to be the hardest: parts of it flaked off with no problem, but I wasn't able to get most of it off before I ran out of time.  I decided to take the chance that the paint was adhered well enough and that there was enough of it removed that the tile would stick.  I was out of time, but the carpet was removed.  My Dad would arrive the next day to lay the tile.  But that is for another post.

The Shop Floor: Introduction

enemy (n):
1. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe
2. Something destructive or injurious in its effects

                                                                              - The American Heritage Dictionary

    The shop floor is my nemesis, plain and simple.  I hate it and it hates me.  As one of the requirements of the State of Wisconsin to operate a tattoo parlor, there has to be a hard surfaced floor.  Carpeting is not allowed.  So I decided that to save money and in the spirit of fixing and improving my own home, I decided that I would lie a ceramic tile floor in the basement.  In the sense that a nemesis is one who feels hatred toward or intends injury to something, I am the nemesis of the floor because I want to break it all and I hate it every time I see it.  In the sense that is it destructive and injurious in its effects it is my nemesis because it haunts me day and night and every time I go down there.
     Now granted, I spent a lot of time, effort, and frustration over the course of many days getting a little more intimate with the floor than I would have liked to, so I tend to look at it with an overly critical eye.  I look at the floor and see every flaw, and I am sure Traci does too, and I am sure you would if you installed tile for a living, or you were looking at buying the house (which won't happen - I won't allow that house to be sold with that floor in the basement), or maybe if you were just a jerko you might notice the same things, but most of the people who come through there aren't looking at the floor, and the ones who are seem to say that it looks just fine.
    In truth, I was in a little over my head on this project.  But I learned a ton in the process, and with what I know now I would do it over for sure, or do it again in another room for sure.  But we will get into that later.  For now we will just go through the process of how I went about it (with help from my Dad since he was unfortunate enough to offer) and then at the end we can talk about what I learned and what advice I would give.  But for now we should just start at the beginning, and that beginning is with removing the carpet.

Lessons from Painting

    One of the key things about living life in today's society - well any society - is to make sure that you learn lessons from the things that you do, so you can do them better in the future.  Like when you make a pizza and it comes out more done on the one half than the other, you need to learn the lesson that your oven doesn't heat evenly and you should rotate your food halfway through.  Or perhaps when you are a caveman and you kill a buffalo you learn that hitting him with a spear in one spot kills him really easily, you need to learn the lesson that that is how you kill a buffalo without getting gored or maimed or exhausted or whatever.  That's evolution.  So let's take a look at some of the lessons I learned from painting the basement, and what advice those lessons would lead me to give to you.  Some of these things are going to seem like they are elementary to you but I didn't know them so I am telling them to you anyway.  Take that.

- Take your time and be very thorough with your prep work.  I am sort of ashamed to admit that this is one area in which I skimped when I was painting the basement, and I am paying for it to some degree.  We sort of rushed things into production and went through the prepping very quickly and as such missed some things.  For instance there were some holes that we missed filling, which wouldn't be such a big deal except when there are holes drilled in paneling there tends to be a little mound of material that builds up around the hole, and those needed to be sanded down and the holes filled.  Also, there were some areas around the window and door that once had plastic on them, and that clear adhesive tape that they use to stick the plastic to the wall was still there.  I didn't notice until it was too late, and now that there is paint there it is very noticeable if you are looking.  So I would advise to take a lot of time to make sure that your prep work is done completely and done well.  Also, make sure you take a lot of pains with your drop cloths and move as much furniture out of the room as you can.

-  When painting paneling, sand the paneling before you paint.  I am serious.  I know that they do wonderful things with paint chemistry these days.  I really do.  But the bottom line is that paint - no matter how technologically advanced - still needs something to adhere to.  It still needs some sort of texture to bond itself too, and paneling is just too smooth.  I would advise at least lightly sanding and paneling that you might have to paint and then making sure you wipe it clean before applying paint.  I did not do this, and as a consequence whenever I scratch against the wall the paint just comes right off and you can see the paneling underneath.  The layers of paint adhere to one another just fine, but the first layer just can't seem to stick to the paneling when under duress, and it has lead to some annoying repairs and ugly marks.

-  Beware the grooves.  The grooves on the paneling cause a lot of problems.  First of all, they are deep so you can't get in them well with a roller.  Second, they are textured when the rest of the paneling is not, so it takes more paint to get in there and get a nice even coat than it does to do the rest of the wall, and it makes it just a pain in the ass.  Also, it is really easy to miss parts of the grooves or paint the grooves unevenly, which leads me to...

- Don't divide the work.  I know this sounds stupid, but hear me out.  Because the grooves in the paneling are such a different animal, it is really tempting to assign one person to paint them all in and another to swoop around with the roller.  That is what we did.  What happened then was that I went with the paintbrush putting a heavier coat of paint in the grooves and giving it a brush texture while Traci went the other way around the room with the roller doing the surface of the paneling with a roller texture.  What ended up happening was that I had by necessity laid a thicker coat of paint than she did and the wall ended up being striped when you look at it very closely, especially because we used a light colored finish coat.  If you want to divide up the work, make sure that the roller person follows immediately behind the groove painter, because the roller will even out the paint and give it an even texture.

- Tape.   I know that taping sucks, because it takes forever, it doesn't always work right, and sometimes it takes off the paint underneath.  I get that.  But it is important.  We decided not to tape and even though I used a straight edge the lines aren't always straight, they certainly aren't even, and there are places where the trim paint got on the walls.  So take the time and make the effort to tape, especially when you are doing painting inside, because it is probably going to get more scrutiny.


-  Don't brush too much.  I have a nasty tendency to get a little overexcited with the brush or roller, and all it does is thin out the paint and make it uneven.  When it looks good just stop.


-  Slow down and pay attention.

     So that is about it.  That is mostly what I learned, and I will definitely put those things into practice when I do my next painting, which will be some trim around the baseboard (because of a floor project that we did) and eventually the outside of the house.  If I could do it all again I would and I would definitely use what I learned.  But we live and we learn.  And I hope you did too.