A Study in Black and White

Last night Pete and I started to lay the tile floor in the upstairs bathroom. I'd never done ceramic tile, I've only laid vinyl tiles, fortunately, Pete is good at this. We started by rolling out the heating floor mats that Pete bought as a housewarming present for Lisa and I, and taping them to the floor. We fed the electrical leads through the channel we had chipped out of the floor.

Then we had to fish the wires up the wall to the box where the controls will be, we had left a string in place for this purpose. After successfully doing this, Pete remembered that we hadn't run the thermostat wire. Of course we then broke the string and had to then fish a wire back through again and start over. 30 minutes later we had this step finished.

After mixing the mortar we dry laid the two walls of the back of the "el" to see how we were going to fit. Since it was already 10:15 PM we knew we'd only work until our bucket of mortar was gone. Also we knew we wouldn't do any of the difficult cut pieces since we didn't want to run a tile saw while the girls were asleep. Pete then started laying along the two walls

Going over the heating mats proved to be a bit of a challenge, we needed to leave a deeper bed outside the mats so there wouldn't be a noticeable change in the floor when we passed over them. Pete continued to lay working toward the shower. I cut full sheets down as needed, and kept bringing fresh boxes of tiles.

By 11:15 we were ready to "turn the corner." We left space to fill in with individual tiles around the tub supplies and drain. We also left space to fill next to the diagonal side of the corner shower.

 

We filled toward the bathroom door and ran out of mortar just short of the WC, leaving only it and the rest of the longer leg of the bathroom. We cleaned up about 12:15 AM

After we finish the floor, I'll put in the baseboard, then we'll be ready to put subway tiles over the lower half of the outer walls.

-Mike