Layin' It Down... Part Two - Tile

And now we're back for round two. Sorry for the long gap between posts. I'm sure life has been miserably incomplete since you finished part one and I feel your pain. Sadly, I've also decided that I will probably need to do a part three, so we'll see how long that takes as well.

Anyway, in my last post, I covered our subfloor prep and installation. In this post I'll talk about laying the tile and grouting. I may not go into extreme detail on some things just to keep this post from being ridiculously long, so feel free to ask questions in the comments if you want to know more about something.

With the subfloor dried and ready to work on top of, the first step was to mark the center lines for the room and lay down some tiles to get our spacing and positioning. Now, in our kitchen, I was able to cheat a bit. I only measured the open part of the kitchen floor and did not measure into the gaps in the cabinets for the stove and refrigerator. Why? Well, because you'll never see it, and I was more worried about having full tiles running along the two walls of the kitchen that don't have cabinets. Those will be seen and I didn't want cut tiles along an open wall.

The process is pretty simple. Once you measure and mark your two center lines with a chalk line, you lay down tiles (dry, no mortar at this point) with spacers in between starting from the center and working your way out to all four walls. I should probably also mention that you lay them on either side of the chalk lines, not centered on them. Once you reach the walls, unless you are incredibly lucky, you will reach a point where there is no longer space for a full tile. This is where you need to measure the space left over and decide which direction you want to shift the tiles so that you have a flush edge where you want it. For our room, we had to adjust our lines more towards the cabinets in both directions to get full tiles on the outside edges and entryways of the kitchen. Once you've found that distance, go back and re-mark chalk lines. This gives you guide lines to work off of when you start laying tiles for real.

Tracy laying tile. You can see the pre-spaced tile behind her

Now comes the point where I got crazy and threw the playbook out the window. Being my first time doing this ever, I didn't think I would be able to have mixed mortar sitting around and also be able to cut tiles as we laid them. So, while my tiles were still down after getting my spacing, I kept laying tile around the edge of the room and did my cuts ahead of time. Let me put this in big bold letters, I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS! You can get into a lot of trouble very quickly by doing so and having to buy more mortar is better than having to pull up poorly fit tile. Things change once mortar gets involved and one early tile being off by 1/16 of an inch can compound into spacing issues later on in the job.

Ask me when it'll be finished again
and this tile is comin' your way!

Once I finished spacing things out, we mixed up some mortar and started slapping down some tile. Again, I kind of made up my own rules for this part. Some articles I had read said to start in the middle and work out, others showed how to start on the edge and sort of work around the room. Instead, I started on one edge of the kitchen doing the south wall and pantry then went back and forth in rows working towards the north end. There were some minor issues that came up, but we'll talk more about that in the last segment.

The hardest part on this step, I felt, was maintaining the spacing of the tiles. The grooves that you make with the trowel create suction that holds the tile down, but even after you tamp the tile with a mallet to lock it down, it can still shift sideways. That's why I found it helpful to keep an eye on the spacers and to check back a couple tiles every so often and make sure nothing had shifted. If it had, I simply tapped it back into place and continued. It's especially important when laying the first row or two, since those tiles become your guide for each following row there after. Like a said before, 1/16 of an inch here and 1/8 there add up to big trouble by the end of the job.

Well, that's the abridged version of getting the tile down, so the hard part is over. Part three will quickly cover grouting and go into some of the mistakes me made along the way. There were plenty, so be sure and check in so you can avoid them yourself.

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