UPSTAIRS BATH PART 1 – THE FLOORS

So we’ve officially started working on finishing one of our full bathrooms so that we can start to nail down a move in timeline.  It’s crazy that this enormous project of ours is starting to wrap up and putting some of these finishing elements in is just making it all the more real.  Despite his best efforts, the husband has indeed decided he would help me tile so that we can get things done quicker (and so that I don’t go crazy/have an anxiety attack trying to get things right by myself), so the other weekend we spent a whole day tiling the upstairs hall bathroom and managed to get the floor complete and IT. LOOKS. AWESOME.  (If I do say so myself)

If you’ve been following along, you may recall the great Hex Tile debate from a few months ago (thank you to everyone who voted, it was super helpful!).  While I was 100% sure about using hex tiles, I needed to decide on what accent pattern to use to make the bathroom a bit more fun than just a solid white floor.  We netted out with a retro-inspired dot pattern with the green spaced out about 3″ from each other so as to not overwhelm the space.  I went through a few rounds of dry-setting the tile in the bathroom where I layered the green tiles on top of the white sheets until I found the right spacing and 3″ felt like it best suited the space.  The bathroom isn’t that big so subtlety was key here.

What I mistakenly assumed when designing this bathroom was that the mosaic sheets of 1″ hexagons would be easier than larger individual tiles.  Unfortunately, that was not the case.  After figuring out that we needed 2 different versions of the white sheets with holes for the green tiles made, and pulling out countless white tiles, we quickly realized that laying the white sheets was not as simple as it looked.

First we had to decide how the tile would end into the tub on the one side of the bathroom.  We decided the easiest (and cleanest) option would be to nip 1/4 of the first full row of tiles off so that there was a straight line with no need to fill in any holes.  Well…easier said than done.  The nippers we bought at Home Depot are just slightly less than 1″ which meant that every time we cut a tile it looked like it had little cat ears…as a result we bought a file to try to minimize the “ear” shape.  Given the space is about 5′ wide and the tiles were 1″ I’m sure you can guess how much prep time went into this space.

The next adventure was mixing the thinset.  Now, this was the first real tiling project either of us have done (with the exception of my mini tester back-splash that I did with pre-mixed thinset and grout).  So that made us both pretty nervous about getting everything right and the thinset was no exception.  All we could find online were videos and instructions saying to add dry mix with water and mix it until it looks like peanut butter…SERIOUSLY!?  How could no one give you proportions to at least aim for?!  So off we went, trying to make some cement peanut butter.  No one said what brand or type of peanut butter we were going for so how thick was it supposed to be???  I guess we’ll find out down the road if the tiles start to pop off because our cement was not mixed to the right peanut butter consistency but we’re just going to hope for the best.

Once we got into a groove of laying the sheets and adding in the green tiles, it wasn’t horrible.  There were a few moments of panic when things didn’t seem to line up just right (remember how I said it wasn’t as simple as it looked?  I had to eyeball the gap that the sheets had withing them to space them out as I went so that nothing seemed off…that was stressful!), but all in all I’m really happy with how it came out and pretty darn proud of us for the accomplishment!  Next step, grout!  As much as I love great contrast, we’re going with a light grey to not strike a balance between showcasing the shape and design of the tile while not overpowering it.

Until next time!