Laundry Room Tile is Complete

I’m glad that job is done. Here is the final product.

 

It took more time than expected to get it to completion, but it was so worth it. Tiling is not very hard, it is just extremely time consuming. We opened a few boxes of tile and noticed a huge color variation-the dye lot was apparently mismarked. Can you see the row of tiles in the center? They are much lighter than the others, but then I ran into some light ones mixed in with dark ones in full boxes so we just mixed them all together. Tanner helped install the cement board underlayment. The next day we began tiling around 9AM. I manned the tile saw and Tanner laid the tiles. He insisted that we do an offset pattern. I insisted it was more cutting and more work. We went back and forth for a little bit and I finally conceded. It definitely adds a lot more character than the straight stack---a good choice.Tanner helped until about 3PM until two of us no longer fit in the tight bathroom. (I really thought we would be done by 2PM with two of us working-ha!) I kept working and working thinking that I was almost done. I frequently messed up the cuts when ever I had to turn the tile upside down in order for it to fit through the saw. I am one of those people who are “left/right” challenged. Throw in an upside down as well and if leads to a lot of re-dos. I was able to use those mis-cut pieces in other places, but it did add to a lot of frustrations and time delays along the way.

I finally finished up around 8PM-totally exhausted. We had moved the washer & dryer into the kitchen so I thought we would grout the following day to minimize being without the washer and dryer. My poor body would not cooperate. I could hardly move, so we put grouting off for another day. It went surprisingly fast-only 4 hours in comparison to the 11 hour it took to lay the tile.

Here are a couple more shots of the completed job.