New tile!

So, Joe has been pretty awesome lately.

Why you ask?

He's been putting down new tile in our living room as a new front entry.

You see, a few years ago, our dear puppy Paige took offense to the carpet by the front door. So, she decided it, and some of the pad, needed to be punished. Here's what happened.

So, for the last few years, we've just had the carpet flopped in with a rug over the top because we didn't think we could afford to fix the problem. We were originally thinking about just putting down new carpet in that room and the master bedroom (can be seen along the right edge of the picture). We recently decided that tile would be good and probably not too expensive. We just had to make sure the carpet could be repaired. We were right and a guy I work with (We'll call him F) is able to do the carpet repair. So, we got to work.

 For about $9.00 each at Home Depot, we bought 1/4" cement board. We have a very solid, old floor underneath the carpet so we didn't have to go with the 1/2". Thinner, less stable (bouncier?) floors would probably need 1/2". For example, our laundry room was added onto the back of the house and has a storage room dug out beneath it. The floor is a bit flimsy and shakes when the washer is on spin cycle. If we were to put tile in there, we'd have to use the 1/2".

Anyway, here's Joe using a utility knife to cut the cement board down to size. The genius that he is, he did all the math and only had to cut each board once. I'd be measuring and cutting for an hour. I'm just that bad with math. Anyway, once the board was scored, he was just able to snap it to the right size.

We then pulled the carpet back out of the way and cut the damaged pad out, just larger than the area where the tile would go. We did this so there was room for new tack strip for when we have the carpet relayed tomorrow. So, once the pad was out of the way, Joe swept and vacuumed the area...

Then started adding premixed thinset mortar directly to the plywood.We picked up the premixed mortar (for porcelain tile) from Home Depot for about $27.00 for a gallon bucket. We ended up needing 2.  Some people don't do this step and that's okay. We want to make sure that NOTHING short of a jackhammer will remove the tile.

So after putting down the thinset, he used a 1/4"x1/4"x1/4" trowel to put grooves in it. I'm not sure why this is done, it's just what the instructions and my dad told us to do. It turned out to have just  a few lumps and you can see them, but that's okay. It doesn't make a difference as far as we know.

Then we put the cement board down on top and pushed it into place.

Once both pieces of cement board were down, we took screws specifically designed for the task (about $10.00 at Home Depot for more than enough screws and found next to the cement board) and screwed the cement board down to the subfloor.

It looked a bit silly, but so worth it. We had to leave it like this for 24 hours.

When we got to put the tile down! Yay! What isn't shown here is the process of putting the tile down, mostly because it's almost identical to putting down the cement board. The tile was the most expensive part. We went to a local store and bought some of their clearance for around $2.00 a square foot so that came out to around $60.00 for the 3'x9' area we tiled. We also added a bronze trim piece (about $1.00 a lineal foot) around the edge as a sort of transition from the tile to the carpet. Joe measured, cut, bent it to the right size, and then used roofing nails to tack it down to the cement board. He put down more thinset right on top of the cement board and then ran grooves through it again, this time with a 1/4"x3/8"x1/4" trowel which is the correct size trowel to use for 14" porcelain tiles with a 3/8" space for grout. We used 3/8" spacers between the tiles (the little white dots you can see). We then had to stay off the tile (it was kind of fun jumping over it) for 24 hours before we could fill in all the area between the tiles with...

Grout! Joe did this while I was at work, the sneaky man, not that I could really help with much anyway. He put the grout into and on the cracks and used a grout float to push the grout into the cracks. The grout float cost about  $10.00. The grout was premixed and cost about $10.00 for the pint we needed. After all the spaces were filled in, Joe wiped it down with a tile sponge (Dad had one so we didn't have to buy it) until the tile was nice and clean. It took a few times (5 or 6 I think) but it worked out really well. I got home as he was cleaning the grout off the tile. Again, we had to stay off it for 24 hours, but it was worth it in the end.

 

 This is the finished product. We are getting the carpet fixed tomorrow. All in all, we spent probably about $150.00 for the entire project and that's all we'll spend as F will do the carpet for free because it's such a small area. So, that's our adventure for the past week. So, did Joe do a great job or what?

I have the best husband ever.