Moving On – Tile, Mortar, Grout

This post is from from my other blog here

Even in sadness, work in the house continues full speed ahead. It's actually nice to have some manual labor tasks to do—when you're with grout and mortar it's hard to do anything else than concentrate on the task at hand. One of our major to-do's was to finished up all the internal tiling in the house. There were two sections, the corner/stairs in Eric's studio and the entryway for the door under the stoop. Both are completely finished at this point, although the entry way tile has not been seal yet. We got a new batch of stone tile sealer that works even better than the last batch. It gives the slate tile that permanent wet look.

The corner in Eric's studio was a huge pain in the ass to do as the pitch of the concrete in that section was so crazy uneven it was almost impossible to tile. In the spring we had poured self leveling concrete in that area which helped the pitch quite a bit. However it was still a bit cold when we did that and it appears that since then the concrete had shifted and settled, leaving us again with a crazy-uneven surface. Evidently you should only pour concrete between 65-75 degrees to get the best results, and it was definitely colder than that when we did this. Oh well. Now we know.

This is what the corner and the stairs looked like before:

So the plan was to use our 12x12 multi-colored slate tiles both in this corner and on the stairs and cap the edges with 1.5 x 1.5 inch aluminum L-channels. Sounds easy enough right? It's quite a small area. We tried to even out the pitch by using more mortar in places with lower pitch but that strategy did not seem to work at all. What a luxury it must be to tile on perfectly level concrete board! We were able to even the pitch pretty well by using thicker tiles in lower sections and thinner ones in higher sections—the inherent unevenness of the slate tile really helped us in that respect. It was a lot of trial and error but we eventually got everything pretty damn level. Then we decided to give a grout bag a try instead of doing grout the traditional way. Normally you take the grout and spread it all over the tile, forcing it into the sections in between and then wiping off the tile surface. I'm sure it works fine on porcelain and glass tiles, but for a porous material like slate it left a lot of cleanup work. That is how the rest of the tile in our house was done by the contractor and we spent hours and hours cleaning the grout haze left behind. We figured it we could avoid getting grout on the majority of the tile it would be easy to clean and seal. So the extra time we took to grout with the bag (which resembles a large cake decorating bag) was well worth it when it came to clean up time. We even figured out that you want your grout slight more watery than normal to make the bag work optimal. We specifically did this indoor tile section as a trial run before we try our hand at the outdoor tiling.

Once the grouting was complete we cleaned off any excess and were able to seal both the tile and the grout almost immediately. This give the tile that permanent wet looks instead of the gray haze we had everywhere else. It was much easier to clean the tile once than it was to clean it 4 times like we did everywhere else. Three cheers for taking your time to do things the right way the first time!

Then Eric spent most of the day cutting the L-channel brackets to fit around the ledge and stair edges and either screwed or glued them into place (with liquid nails) depending on whether or not the surface behind was conducive to screwing into. Here's the final result. There's not much light in this corner so you can't see how wet the tile looks, but rest assured it all looks like the stair tiles.

Yes we see now we should have lined up the tile lines to the stair lines to keep it even, but hey this was a learning experience. Now we know.

Next weekend we'll clean and seal the entryway tile and finally hang our hall tree in the entrance which should really tie that whole area together. We already cut, mortared and grouted the tile pieces to use as molding around that area instead of the wood the contractor installed. Wood molding around tile flooring? In an area that gets moist and can overflow when it rains? Not smart.

Also on deck this week is the possible installation of our new front door which has been a year in the making. In addition, we found out this weekend that one of our tenants took a job overseas and wants to terminate his lease soon. That means we need to push up the timetable on some of the common area repairs we wanted to do before we start showing the place to perspective tenants. That's the way it is around here, non-stop action. We took a few days to mourn and now it's back to work. Sigh.