A Penny for Your Thoughts

Hello! One busy week for us in the upstairs hall bathroom with the focus on tile!

John and I went over on Tuesday evening to grout the shower tile that we had finished the previous weekend. We were not new to grout as we had grouted the bathroom floor downstairs but we have never grouted a wall area this large. I started prepping the wall and making sure we were ready for grout while John went downstairs to mix it as we do not buy pre-mixed grout as we have the tools to mix it already and it saves some money that way. John came up and we started grouting...when grouting a wall, we learned that if you have too much grout on your float, it is just going to fall down and land on the floor so that was a tad frustrating and we did have a good amount of waste. The good news, we had laid plastic down over the tub already so we were not creating too big of a mess. We grouted away and when we had let it set for 10-15 minutes, I came back with a damp sponge to remove the excess grout. We continued this process until the grout hardened...which was not ideal because we only had a small section of tile left to go! Super frustrating! The issue here was that we had mixed the grout with warm water and it sped up the process....why, warm water? Well, that is an interesting question and I will do my best to explain.

When John had installed the plumbing in the shower for the tub faucet and shower head, it needed to have a mixing valve, the thing that controls the hot and cold water. The factory setting on the mixing valve does not have the cartridge installed that separates the hot and cold water within the fixture. So in essence, we had our hot and cold water mixing throughout the house as the lines were not separated. We could not install the cartridge until our tile was installed and grouted as we had to install the whole fixture at once. Normally, when you hire someone, they are completing this whole task - plumbing, tile, grout, fixtures - in 4-5 days...ours was over 2-3 weeks so the hot water mixing in the cold water lines issue was prolonged.

Nevertheless, we kept moving and grooving. Thursday, we went and purchased more grout so that we would have enough for the weekend and picked up more for the floor as we decided we did not have enough (great thinking...because we did not have enough and used the extra we purchased)! Friday after work, we hit the ground running and finished the grout.

Then we had the task of removing the plastic tarp from the tub...this proved to be more difficult than we expected. The tape had been on the tub for 2-3 weeks and was semi under the tile so it was not coming off. I had to grab the exacto knife to cut the tape below the tile and that took some time! Was it frustrating, yes. However, we were able to keep the tub free of grout and it was pretty easy cleanup. The next thing we ticked off the list was installing the uncoupling membrane, similar to downstairs although this time we needed to use a waterproofing tape as this was a necessary step in a bathroom that has a tub and shower. The Schluter membrane was easy enough to cut but we did not have the easiest time mixing the thin set and using it to stick the membrane to the floor...John was pretty frustrated with the whole process but it is done!

(The light orange strips is the tape that we used on the seams of the membrane to waterproof the area)

After the frustration with the thin set as the one we had bought was made by Schluter and was more pricey...ultimately, we decided the $5 bag from Home Depot is an easier project to work with and what we prefer. Once the membrane was down, we headed downstairs to figure out the penny tile pattern that we wanted to do. While John was wrapping up the membrane, I was busy putting the outline in tape on the living room floor so we had the exact dimensions to lay the penny tile down to assist with the design. John and I tried a few different ideas and ultimately decided after 45 minutes that a pattern was not going to happen... We were ok with this decision as it would have added approximately another 3-5 hours in the tiling process and the stress and frustration was not worth it. Even though the penny tile is on sheets, you still have to lay it a specific way, alternating the long row and that was making designing a pattern very difficult. There is a reason professional tilers charge more for installing a penny tile pattern...and we now know why!

On Saturday, it was time to penny tile! We used our $5 mortar, mixed it up and off to tiling we went. Laying the penny tile was pretty simple as they came in sheets. We lined the straight edge up with the tub and used the smaller notched trowel to make sure that we did not put too much down as we did not want it coming through the mesh like what happened last weekend. John would lay a section of mortar and I would lay the tile, we had a pretty good rhythm going. The other great part of using penny tile is that it is easy to cut down to length and remove rows/pieces with aviation snips by just cutting through the mesh. This made the process go fairly quickly. Once the tile was laid, we called it a day at Wallpaper Acres and went to the Zoo to run a 5k!

(Note: the sides of the tile that is next to the wall will be under baseboards so no reason to fill in the missing pieces as it will be covered!)

Sunday was another fun day of grout! But before we got started, we needed to install the mixing valve to fix our hot/cold water issue. This process was pretty easy as we had to follow instructions and there were not too many pieces to get confused. Take a look at our fancy mixing valve - the first fixture installed in the bathroom! Also, can confirm that this fixed the hot and cold water issue and we now do not only have hot water throughout the house!

Now onto the grout! We chose a charcoal color to contrast the white penny tile and this is the first time I have used an almost black grout...and it is a mess! It is one of those things that you have to make a mess in order to clean it off and since it is black...it just is messy! John laid the grout while I came back in and used a damp sponge for a couple of passes. This time, we mixed smaller batches of grout so we would not run into the same issue from earlier in the week. The white tile was still noticeably dirty at this point so we used shop towels to lightly wipe the grout of the tiles and this method worked quite nicely. We followed this process 5-6 times until we had the whole space grouted! I absolutely love how this looks and we only have a couple of touchups (a couple of individual penny tiles that were on the edges of the sheets did not adhere and need to be re-stuck to the floor) and a thorough cleaning for the floor to be finished!

The bathroom has come very far and is close to the finish line - stay tuned to see the finished project. Thanks for reading another Wallpaper Acres blog!