How long does it take to tile a rather large shower?
For us, it took six months. We mostly only worked on weekends. Truth be told, there were a lot of Sundays when we did nothing on the shower. Why? Because life in the middle of a pandemic can be hard.
We also had two weeks on two different trips to Kansas and one week for our epic Montana-Idaho-Wyoming adventure.
Just for fun, I counted up the number of tiles we had to place in the shower. I’m not counting the individual mosaic pieces, just sheets of mosaics.
What’s your best guess for a 16 square-foot shower with most of the walls covered by 24 x 12 inch tiles?
I counted 191 pieces or sheets of tile covering the walls and the floor. That doesn’t factor in the dozens of tiles that needed to be cut twice (or thrice) because we messed up. We did something different on the ceiling. More on that in my next DIY IRL post.
Red Guard waterproofing is the last step before tiling the walls.
After demo, framing, wiring in the ceiling light, plumbing for the new shower fixtures, pouring the shower pan pre-slope over the not quite Goof Proof Pre-Pitch sticks (doing it again because of an epic fail), and folding and stapling in the vinyl shower liner, laying out the Goof Proof Quick Pitch sticks and pouring the actual shower pan, installing cement backerboards, taping the joints, and painting on the waterproof membrane (Red Guard, or Redrum, as I like to call it. Shawn calls it the portal to H- E-double-hockey-sticks, in my paraphrase), you’re ready to start laying tile.
Got that?
Don’t worry. We didn’t fully comprehend what we were getting ourselves into. Would we do it again? Not in the same way, that’s for certain. Come along on the next chapter of our master bath renovation adventure.
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Tales of Tiling
Here’s what you’re gonna need if you want to tile a shower:
A tile saw (or two): we started with one we’d bought years ago but had never been out of the box. If I’d known I wanted to use 12-inch-by-24-inch tiles in my shower project, I’d never have bought this one. I couldn’t find the exact model, but it was similar to this one, except we put it on sawhorses.
It couldn’t handle that size of tile without major modification, which kind of worked. About a third of the way through the shower tiling project, it broke. We were glad because it required a garden hose to run and made a huge mess, so we did all the cutting downstairs just inside the garage with the dirty water running down the driveway. Cutting tile required going up and down the stairs 47 times a day.
After the fortuitous breakage, we bought this tile saw from Floor and Decor that made it easier to cut large format tiles. It had a reservoir for water, so we could put it in the bathroom and cut tiles right by the shower. This, of course, was highly convenient but very messy. Cutting tile produces tile dust. Our master bedroom suite is now decorated with layers of tile dust. It matches the backer board dust and now the joint compound dust, so we have a whole theme going.
You also need thinset mortar, a large notched trowel, a small notched trowel, spacers, now this one is super important: a tile leveling system, and a giant beater that turns your drill into an awesome mixer. The hardware guys don’t call them beaters. They’re “steel spiral mixing arms.” Mixing arms is a stupid name, if you ask me. But you need one if you’re going to get your mortar all smooth and lovely.
We also bought a large score-and-snap manual tile cutter that I couldn’t operate and often chipped tiles anyway AND a pair of tile nippers. The nippers looked like they would be pretty useful, but we lost them early in the project and never replaced them because some people are stubborn about not buying things they know they have but can’t find. So they suffer through using different tools. Maybe the nippers went through the portal to H-E-double-hockey-sticks.
Anyway, we started with the floor. I used one-foot sheets of 2-inch-by2-inch porcelain tiles. I made a template for the challenging angle at the front of the shower. The first tile saw did a fine job on the mosaic sheets, and tiling the floor wasn’t too difficult. Because of the bench, it’s only about 13 square feet. I then grouted the floor, and we placed several layers of cardboard over it to protect it from flying mortar, dropped tools, etc.
Then we started the walls. We’d already placed a slab of marble on the bench, sloped to shed water. That was our starting point on the back wall. For the side walls, we needed ledger boards, which need to be long, skinny and straight. You also want a long level to make sure the ledger boards are level. We installed the ledger boards to support the full row of tiles that began at the bench.
We ran our tile ledger boards out from the bench to keep all the tiles and grout lines level.
You want your tile pattern to march up the walls in such a fashion that the row of tiles at the bottom and the top are not too thin. That just looks yucky. Take my word for it. You’re probably going to have to rip the tiles for the bottom and top to fit, you just don’t want them to look like slivers. Unless that’s the look you’re going for. Then you be you.
Mix up your mortar with the giant beater and get to tiling! We used large-format modified thinset in white and a half-inch notched trowel for our big tiles. Thinset comes in white and gray, and since my bodacious design feature marble stripe was white, I didn’t want it to pick up the gray color.
I skimmed a layer of mortar on the back of each tile using a four-inch putty knife. My partner in life and this particular crime used the notched trowel to put a uniform layer of mortar on the walls with ridges that all go the same way. The consistent lines are important to the strength of the bond. Back-buttering each tile ensures that there aren’t any voids without mortar.
This is where you’re going to want to use your tile leveling tile leveling system. Don’t worry. It sounds more intimidating than it is. It’s really just tile spacers with a hole for a wedge, and a special tool to secure the wedge that spans adjacent pieces of tile. The wedges make sure that your tiles are giving you no lip. Really. Lippage is when adjacent tiles are not in the same plane, so you feel a ridge in between them.
Once the mortar is dry, you wiggle out the wedge and use a rubber mallet to whack the side of the spacer and it flies off the wall, sometimes traveling more than a dozen feet. Or hitting your partner in the back. Very satisfying.
http://https://youtu.be/TjYCMT5tsCk
The first row of tiles on the bench had to be shortened by the width of the bench so the grout lines going around the shower all lined up nicely. Then we had a row of full-width tiles followed by a frustrating row of tiles notched around the shower niche.
How marble hex tiles are like ‘Mean Girls’
The shower niche and the stripes on either side were our first introduction to the vagaries of marble hex tile. Like a clique of popular pretty girls in high school, the marble hex mosaics sometimes refused to do what we wanted them to do. They liked to crowd together, not maintaining proper social distancing for grout lines. Or a few of them tilted out of plane or tried to reject the clique (or sheet of marble mosaics) next to them. They were, like teenage girls, exceedingly frustrating but oh, so cute when they behaved themselves.
Oh, marble hex tile. How I love your look and hate your installation!
After we set almost all the tiles, my Fix-it Farmer hubby, Shawn, went back and removed the worst of the hex offenders. He used various sizes of carbide-tipped tile drill bits to make holes in the marble, and then a set of cold chisels to chip those slouching gals right out of the lineup. I then back-buttered and set replacement pieces of marble hex that did a better job of playing well with others.
Removing crooked hexes ended up being one of the jobs that turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, but we only did four because we didn’t want to press our luck with hexes.
The long, skinny pieces of marble framing the hexes for the stripe and the niche also required special care, meaning you had to set them in place and allow them to dry before placing tiles above them. Otherwise, they started slipping down. Gravity’s a bear that will eat your marble.
Along the way, we learned to clean out the grout lines in between tiles while the thinset was still wet because it’s 100 times harder to clean it out after it dries. Except it still seemed to collect around the tile-leveling spacers, requiring a lot of clean-up work before grouting.
Since this post is going so long as I vent about… I mean explain this complicated process, I will save the ceiling treatment, the special edges around the doorway and the grouting job for another post or two. Needless to say, there were hijinks involved.
But here’s a quick word to the wise DIY beginner. Don’t pick marble hex mosaic, no matter how much they make your heart go pitter pat. If I’d known then all the trouble their irregular beauty was going to give me, I’d have given them the cold shoulder.
Be smarter than me. Pick something straight, true, rectangular, maybe even porcelain. Your future self will thank me as you have a much easier time tiling the shower.