Weekend Tile-A-Thon

Every morning this winter, as I've walked by our guest bathroom project, I've had a moment of panic as I've imagined taking one wrong step through the open floor and falling through the ceiling. But no more! Not only do we have a new plywood subfloor and the cement board down, we have an actual tile floor!

The tile-a-thon started with a trip to the Tile Shop, where we debated between porcelain basketweave and octagon/dot tile.

                

Buuut... since they only had the octagon/dot in stock, we decided to go with that.

I'm not sure that laying a subfloor is very exciting, so here's the quick version. We leveled the existing floor joists (either by chiseling bits off or gluing shims down)...

Hung a few new joists perpendicular to the original ones to give extra support under the bathtub and sketchy spots...

Glued 'n' screwed down the plywood...

And finished the job with a layer of cement board.

Notice how the seams between the pieces of plywood and the seams between the cement board don't line up? It's important to do it that way so that there aren't any weak spots that could lead to cracked tile or grout. Also important - taping the seams with fiberglass tape and covering them with a layer of thinset. This final step ensures that you're laying tile on a strong subfloor that won't shift or buckle at the edges when weight is placed on top of it (for example, a bathtub that weighs 710 pounds when filled).

Next, we laid out our tile to figure out how we wanted it oriented and where we would need to make cuts. We preferred the tile set diagonally (as viewed when entering the bathroom), which was great because it meant making about a thousand fewer cuts around the edges. And surprisingly, our walls are also fairly straight, so that also saved us from slivering little bits off all over the place. The only finicky cuts were around the pipes and the threshold. 

Here it is, our brand new guest bathroom/pizza parlor!

After all that work, we decided that it kind of looks like we should have a wood-fired pizza oven in the corner and a couple of those tall red plastic soda cups strewn about... hopefully it will look less like Mama Baño's Pizzeria and more like this lovely bathroom found on Pinterest once all the fixtures are in!