Catching Up: Tile

A lot has happened and we're playing catch up.

The DW is a tiling queen. That's all there is to it. I was good for prepping for grout and cleaning up afterward.

This first picture is the guest bath floor. What you can't see is that the room is not particularly square.




What to do about it? Well, don't use these:



They give one a false sense of "squareness" and aren't really very necessary for the floor. In fact, what one can do is gently adjust for "non-square" rooms by squeezing or stretching the gaps between the tiles ever so slightly. Over 8 tiles, 1/8" adds up (to an inch).

Speaking of "not square"...one of the bathrooms is pretty badly wracked. That leaves us with a dilemma; how do we line up the tiles so that they look good and so that they don't highlight our wall problems? Well, DW was all over it. As you can see in the pic below, she lined the tiles up on the corner of the wall that you see as you come in. There's a long line of tile from door to window that really needs to be straight and also dead ahead of you is the cross angle. Fortunately, those two walls intersect in a nearly perfect square.






So far, so good. Looks pretty straight and square in and out and left to right. Most other problems will be behind the door or under trim.











But...there's a problem. If those important lines are maintained square and straight as they were, well, when the tiles get back to the bathtub, there's 1 1/2" of extra space at one end of the tub. See below.












So, how does DW address that? Marble trim legerdemain. She cuts a section out the tiles to allow for the special "trim", fiddle with the sizes of the joints to allow for that 1 1/2" gap, and create an optical illusion of the tile getting smaller as it extends away along the tub.














As you can see, there's hardly a noticeable sign of that unsightly uneven gap.
















Absolutely amazing.


This of course means that there's going to have to be more of that marble trim utilized in the tub surround, but that's another story.