The Shower Continued - Prep and more prep, and finally the tiling begins

Weekend 3 - The tiling
I'm lucky to have a shower at work and we have some nice cousins that let us use their shower. I'm not sure when we will be finished...

The prep work for tiling filled two weekends and a couple of week nights and was still in progress as we headed into memorial day weekend. We called in a plumber to re-plumb our new fixtures and we were glad we did. Plumbers are not cheap but we called him Monday, he came out Tuesday and got the job done in 3 hours. Not sure what the result would be if we had to do that part ourselves. He said it was something that the average home owner should not attempt.

With the walls up, I did a couple of coats of joint compound at the top of the wall, above the tile. I got to be pretty good at smoothing out the seems. We then put on a coat of Hydra Ban which is a water proofing sealant that you just paint on in two coats. That we also picked up from Master Wholesaler.



All these coats of stuff take hours to dry so going into the weekend I was pretty sure we wouldnt actually start tiling until Monday. But this was ok, because as I pulled out the tile that we purchased last November we realized that we didnt buy enough since we changed our design to go a little higher.

So between coats we got the window in and started working on the outside portion where we removed the window. We also got some yardwork and friend time in, which was great!

Alas Monday morning arrived and surfaces were all dry and ready to go.


We were trying to avoid having to cut any tiles because the glass is really fragile so we thought we would start with trying to line up the tiles with the window and see where they would land at the top of the tub. Using rulers and levels we sketched out some lines as guides. It appears that we will be lucky... and no cutting is needed.

Monday at 10 am, we were finally mixing up the thinset and beginning to lay tile. We had to lay the first couple sheets twice. We ended up with a big corner gap, so we scrapped that and on the second time around we started in the corner and laid both sheets at the same time. This worked out much better.



Our first set of tiles took about an hour to get in which is about how long the thinset lasted before it started getting too stiff to adhere to the tiles. Working in these big sheets, you would think it would go faster, but we took a lot of time to get them well spaced and cleaned up. We got into a groove where one person spread out the thinset (the goo) and the other cleaned up and spaced the tiles but it still was slow going.



After one full day of work we were less than halfway done...

BUT I am so excited about how it is turning out!

And the bathroom saga continues... The Shower.

We've been living without a sink since November, we've been doing minor work on the bathroom... putting in the baseboards, moving electrical outlets etc. I was tired of having this project looming over me and I have one million other projects lined up with summer starting and all (building a chicken coop for 1). So we set a date for tiling on Memorial day weekend. Coming up with a little plan in my head, I knew we couldnt do it in one weekend. So 3 weeks ago we decided it was time to give up the shower.

Weekend 1 - We tore out the vinyl surround, took a dump run and picked up supplies.


We got a tip on using "Permabase" cement board as a backer from a friend who had been consulting with a contractor. They sell it in Seattle at Master Wholesaler which is an awesome place if you ever are in the market for construction supplies. They had everything we needed to prep the surround for tiling and they were super nice.



Weekend 2 - Installing the permabase
We were happy to report that we didnt find any damage to the wood below, but what we did find as we demo'ed the walls is that parts of the walls are plaster, and parts have been replaced with drywall. The plaster walls were really uneven, so we had to do some clever shimming and taping to gain the appearance of flat walls. Thats still a work in progress.

We also picked up a couple of pre-formed insets for the soap and a shampoo shelf at Master Wholesaler. We both were having anxiety over trying to build a shelf that would be slanted enough not to pool water but flat enough to hold the soap so we were really excited to find these.

Some scientific naming techniques for our new ladies

Some scientific naming techniques for our new ladies, originally uploaded by Patty OK.