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:

what a waste. what. a. waste.

I'm too n00b to embed videos properly, but this sums up my feelings perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WMHDe2qRQ

"before picture"

Like I mentioned, when we knocked out the tiles we found  that they were laid on sheet metal. In my pre-project research I had read something about using sheet metal under a woodstove to prevent fires from any stray embers that might come out. I couldn't remember where I read that, but since it was my first time doing a project like this I figured I had better follow that advice. Knowing nothing about sheet metal I called a few stores and ended up going to our local handyman store. We had to buy two sheets of metal to cover the area, and it was 24.. weight? thick? I forget the unit already. The cost of these two sheets of 24 whatever? Almost $60. Gulp.

So we brought the metal home and measured it into place. we marked our lines with a sharpie and cut them with tin sheers. It was a pretty easy process, until we started to nail the sheets down.

I had marked where the nails should go (one center, one at each corner) in an attempt to minimize nails and holes so that the tile would sit on it as flat as possible. Thinking this now it sounds totally stupid, but at the time it made perfect sense to me. Anyway, we started hammering in the nails and... started bending them. Like, all of them. Obviously we're not professionals but I'm also not new to nailing things so I found this to be very surprising and frustrating.

We ruined probably 100 nails and made a ton of extra holes, but about an hour later the sheets were in place. Then we thought about laying tiles, but something seemed... wrong. The metal was just so shiny and smooth, it seemed impossible that anything could even stick to it. Then we remembered this weird netting stuff that we pulled up in the demo. It was kind of like fishnet and we thought maybe it had been used to make sure everything held together on the metal.

you can kind-of-almost see a picture of the netting at the bottom center-right

So we were back online, looking for anything we could find about tiling on top of sheet metal. Our results? Nothing. Well, nothing except a few bits of information saying things like "you cannot tile over sheet metal." UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHH.

But then we were confused. Clearly you CAN tile over sheet metal because we just tore some up after it had held well for 20+ years. And what about fires? Heads spinning, we went to the hardware store to ask someone in person. We met a dude working there and his first impression was no way jose. That is a quote. (Not really). But he was very interested in our plight and asked a ton of weird and extraneous questions, and her drew a diagram of the area about 30 times. Ultimately though, he came to the same conclusion: no. (His co-worker agreed.)  Actually, what they really said was that they had never heard of anything so peposterous, and thought it was a totally crazy idea. They also said that the metal wouldn't help prevent fires because it's literally buried under inches of other fire proof materials, so if anything was so hot that it burned through that stuff then entire house would probably already be gone before the sheet metal had a chance to do anything. Comforting. Also, they didn't sell the mesh stuff we thought might help.

Disapointed and still just a bit unsure, we returned home and ripped up all the sheet metal. The sheet metal that set up back about $60 and we had wasted hours putting down. We were not happy campers. And the results after a day's worth of work? It looks almost exactly as it did before we started. Boo.

remember this before shot?

it looks a lot like this after shot. 

that is one expensive pile of garbage

white wash

After the dust had settled from ripping out the disgusto-barfo tile, we were back at it to white wash the brick behind the stove. After looking at pictures like this I was really excited to try my hand at white washing. I really liked how you can see brick through the wash and the paint looks weathered.

I probably should have thought in advance about the fact that I wanted a rustic, weathered look in a room I had just painted in crisp colors in a semi-gloss paint. But I didn't. Instead, I read a bunch of articles describing the process so I jumped right in.

The first step was to "clean" the brick. This cleaning consisted of brushing the walls off with a broom and running over them with a shopvac. Next! I mixed the paint, which was the 100% cheapest paint I could buy from Lowes in the same shade as the white paint I used in the rest of the room, with water. I bought the paint in a flat finish because I didn't like how shiny the rest of the room was and I really didn't want shiny brick. Everything I had read said to use a 50/50 ratio so I did my best by eyeballing it. It was really, really watery.

I was a bit nervous about the mix, so we started with a test spot just above the ground in the back corner. I painted the wash on, and Dave followed me with a rag. This process had been described in every single tutorial I had seen on the subject, but when we did it the rag process seemed to just take off the paint I had put on.

We tried it a few ways: paint then rag immediately, paint, wait a minute then rag, and paint, wait, and blotch with a rag. In the end the rag seemed like a big waste of time so we just skipped it and slapped the paint on. I took one side of the wall and Dave and Twig took the other side.

And in the end this is how it came out:

To be honest I don't love it. I wish I did, because it was a pain in the ass, but I just don't. It looks chalkier than I wanted, and, me'h. I don't love it. Maybe after it's 100% dry I'll like it more. Maybe I should have gotten the paint in eggshell? We'll see in the morning!

demolition

Once the stove was all clean and shiny it was time to get the brick behind it up to snuff. Or so I thought, until I was ready to roll and realized I had no paint. So that story will wait for another day. Not to be deterred, We decided to demo the existing tile instead. This way, i figured. we could knock up any dust we wanted without disturbing our new paint job. Brilliant!

"before"

Who would want to see these go?!

 So, I started by trying to wedge out what I thought was the half-round trim. If you know anything about my parents house, you should know that the people who lived there before them did the most shoddy handiwork possible. And, this was the case again. It wasn't half round separating the tile and wood floor, you see. No, it was chunks of a hand rail. The kind of hand rail that goes along a staircase.

 No matter. We dug the handrails out of what turned out to be a sizeable trench, then just used a hammer and chisel to pull up the tile. I had been warned that this could be very difficult, depending on how the tile was laid, but they came up very easily and only a couple of them broke in the process.

It was dusty, and we definitely should have been wearing respirators. Again. Burning lungs aside, the task was actually super easy.

As we were knocking out the tile around the woodstove my dad asked why didn't we just move it. Um. I thought it couldn't be moved because it weighs exactly 93741234.3 pounds. But, apparently it can be done! So it was moved on to a sheet of plywood just next to us. I really wish I had known that was possible before I polished it. Anyway!

As we pulled up the tile we realized that it had been laid on what I intelligently declared was tin foil, but was actually sheet metal. The thin-set was coming off the metal in chunks, and tile needs to be laid on a clean, flat surface, so we decided to pull that up as well.

This turned out to be a little adventure for us, but that story, too, is for another day. For now, I'll leave you with this glorious image of a hearth free of disgusto-barfo 70's tiles, and a picture of said disgusto-barfo tile  on its way to the garbage.You're welcome.