Tiling the bedroom fireplace, waiting on a mantle.

Question: How do you tile a fireplace that has a 45" threshold with 13"x13"tile?

Yeah, that kindof messed with me for a while. I REALLY didn't want to do too many cuts.... after all this was just to finish up the bedroom floor so we could finish the trim.

OK, yes. There is a thread on all of today's posts. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE TRIM, a.k.a, 'get it DONE and GONE' already. I'm pretty sure we'll be hosting either Thanksgiving or Christmas at our house and I'm going to be hell on heels if there's still trim in the dining room. It will not be pretty, I guarantee you.

In order to finish the trim in the bedroom, we had to finish off the untrimmed drywall around the fireplace opening. No way around it.

So back to bad math: 45/13 = 3.46.
Almost half a tile? Now what?

Somehow I was going to have to fit some combination of tiles in the space provided, which luckily was exactly 13" deep, which is how we came up with the 13" ceramic tiles left over from the master bathroom tile job.

So, my brain returned to the messed up tile job I had to deal with in the Master Bath. Time to get creative.

A bunch of straight cuts for small pieces were going to look goofy, and the other problem was that we barely had enough tile to do the fireplace. (Of course I thought we had a spare 8 tiles, but those disappeared somewhere.) So we had to go sparingly and not use complex cuts that might bust up the tile and waste it.

I decided on using three full squares and two cut squares to fit the threshold. It seemed the only way to go about it.

Also, I HAD to cut the squares and mastic them to the floor (over the existing stone concrete slab) for the base before I could attach the other tiles to the face of the wall, ans the wall piece had to sit ON the floor tiles.

Two full tiles fit on the slab at the far left and right perfectly..... So I put 2 more tiles next to the outliers, then turned a center tile 45 degrees, set it on top of two center tiles and traced the tile onto the other tiles. These would be my cut marks for the cut tiles. I cut off the bottom of the center tile to fit, then put it all into place, later cutting the small 2" pieces for the left and right above the center piece.

It ended up looking like this:

















But then the problem was what to do with the top, above the opening.

First plan was to build a keystone like top... 3 full tiles on each side of the opening and five cuts
at an angle across the top.


That quickly turned out to be a crappy idea.
DH looks at me and says, 'Why not do the same thing at the top?'

Turned out we barely had enough tile to finish the job, but it's done.



















Now we can finish the friggin' trim, RIGHT?!?