Tiles!

After a day spent wasting time and money we were back at it, ready to finally lay some tile. We considered laying them vertically to go along with the grain of the wood floor but decided to lay them horizontally instead. This way the grout lines mirror the lines of the woodstove. Cool beans.

Once that was decided we followed some directions I found on the interwebz and measured and marked the middle point of the area we intended to tile. We started laying out our tiles with spacers to get a sense of how it would look.

It was fairly tedious but, boy - I'm really glad we did it. It was obvious that there would be an akward gap against the wall that would be too small to tile and too big to grout. As we thought about that my dad made the astute observation that people would really only see the first few rows of tiles, so why not start laying everything out based on those?

Brilliant! I had not even considered that because I was so nervous about messing anything up that I was just following "the rules." So we pulled everything off the floor and started laying them out all over again. Tedious, for sure.

We laid the tiles out so that some would edge up against the walls and others would need to be cut in half. This was pretty cool because we didn't need to do many complicated measurements - we could just cut a bunch of tiles in half at once.

To cut the tiles for this project I bought a manual tile cutter like this for about $20.00.

We made a few practice cuts and ocne we got the hang of it it was pretty easy. You just slide the cutter across the tile then press down and the device snaps it for you. The cutter was fine for this job because it involved a lot of small, straight cuts, but for anything more complicated you'd need a wet saw. I was already spending more on this project than I anticipated so I skipped buying or renting one this time.

Once we had all the pieces laid out and ready we started mixing the quick set. We added water to the mix and stirred it all up, following the directions on the packaging. I was nervous I didn't have the right consistency so we had to play around with it a bit.

When it was time to lay the first tile I just sat there holding the quick set  on the spreader thing saying "I'm so nervous! I'm so nervous!" But I took the plunge and laid some of those bad boys down. Like everything else it was really pretty easy once I got a feel for it. You have to work pretty fast so the quick set doesn't try on you, and the directions say don't mix more than you can lay within 20 minutes. We ended up needed to mix up a second batch ti finish laying all the tiles but that's ok - I welcomed the break.

 We stopped laying tile when we got up to the edge where some funkier cuts were required.

Where odd cuts were needed we laid tiles down and marked the required cuts with pencil.

 

 

Like a glove.

Turns out there were two trouble spots where more complex cuts were required than I could make on my simple tile cutter. Those spots needed 'L' shaped cuts. We tried to make them but just ended up breaking a bunch of tiles. Luckily some friends have a wet saw we could use so we can finish those areas up another day.

But for now, I'm pooped and covered in quick set. I leave you with this before and after: