Hexagonal

After a long period of fear and procrastination, we finally tiled our bathroom floor.  As you may remember, when we bought the house, the bathroom had decent looking grey and white tile in the tub surround, counter and backsplash, but the floor was just sheet vinyl (as shown below).  It actually wasn't too ugly for sheet vinyl and vaguely resembled white tiles with grey grout.  But, it still needed to go.  

I have always loved hex tiles, especially on bathroom floors.  I know they aren't that practical, since there is an awful lot of grout to get stained or cracked.  But we figured that with dark grey grout, stains shouldn't show up nearly as easily as with white grout.  

The whole process ended up being pretty involved and taking two weekends.  First we took off the base boards, ripped up the vinyl and took off the toilet.  In a house with only one bathroom, having to take off the toilet is a pretty major deal.  Underneath the vinyl was just plywood subfloor which apparently is too flexible for tile.  So we cut and thin-setted down cement backer board.  After that was dry and we could walk on it we put the toilet back on.  The tile we ordered from Lowe's still hadn't come in yet and we weren't going to go all week without a toilet.  

Once the tile finally came in we took the toilet off again and started dry fitting and cutting the tile. Cutting 1" hex tile on a mesh backing is not an easy thing to do.  We tried cutting it with a wet saw borrowed from a friend at first, but the water disintegrated the glue on the mesh backing and all the tiles started falling off.  We ended getting this kind of paper-cutter-like thing that we used to hand score the tiles and then crack them.  Not super accurate on 1" tiles, but it worked well enough for us. 

After dry fitting all the tiles and numbering each sheet, we layer them down with thin-set.  

Here they are all thin-stetted down. 

The next day was grouting, then buffing, putting the toilet back on, and more buffing. 


All in all I think it turned out pretty ok for our first ever tiling experience.  Definitely not perfect, but good enough to live with. 

We still need to put the baseboards back on.  That should hide some of the roughness around the edges.   

I think it made us more confident in the possibility of tiling the kitchen floor and backsplash at some point and I think it saved us a good chunk of change. 

Bathroom Refreshing

The bathroom and the kitchen are the two rooms in our house that need kind of major stuff done to them and therefor have had pretty much nothing done to them since we moved in. The major stuff the bathroom needs are tile on the floor to replace the ugly linoleum, a new mirror, a new light fixture and a new tub. We still aren't quite ready to tackle any of these major things, but what we can do is paint. The cabinets were a light colored wood with peeling off varnish. There were no knobs on most of the cabinets (which contributed to the water stains and peeling varnish), except for the linen cabinet which had one broken handle. There was a medicine cabinet above the toilet, which must have been added later, because unlike the rest of the cabinets, it was white. The one thing we did like about our bathroom was the tile in the shower and sink back splash with the grey accent tiles. Here are some pictures from before we moved in.

We decided to paint the cabinets white (actually Valspar Betsy's Linen) to match the trim and the white medicine cabinet and we painted the walls grey to sort of match the accent tiles. As usual it was really hard to find the right color grey. The first one we got ended up looking purple on the walls. The one we ended up with was Valspar Notre Dame. It is a little lighter than the tiles so that it wouldn't be too dark for such a small bathroom.

We ended up finding the knobs on Amazon because I had this specific style in mind and neither Home Depot or Lowes had anything close.

We still need to tackle the major stuff, but for less than $150 I think we managed to make the bathroom feel fresh and much more cohesive.