New Floors – Here We Come

Today actually went about as well as we could have hoped for. The biggest hiccup was probably the fact that all of our water shutoff valves are so old they don’t actually shut the water off completely. Obviously when trying to remove a toilet and vanity, this makes things somewhat difficult. My genius work around in the past has been to hook up a cheap faucet to the shut off valve, but that was always for dealing with replacing the faucet on a vanity, never a toilet. Luckily this worked like a charm for the toilet as well. With the toilet removed (and as you can see, resting in the tub), and the vanity taken out, the room was cleared to remove the rest of the tile. Amazingly the tile/adhesive removal went much faster than yesterday and we were able to power through it in much less time than we anticipated.

Earlier in the day we had gone to Floor & Decor to pick out the new tile and purchased all of the necessary tools and accessories that we thought would need to complete the job. With the tile and adhesive fully removed from the room, it was time to lay down the new tile. We knew that the biggest obstacle we would face in the entire job was cutting the space for the toilet flange. All of the other cuts could be accomplished with a simple tile cutter, but the toilet flange required a corner cut. I remembered how much effort that took when we did the back splash, so instead of trying to do this manually, I went to Lowe’s and purchased and angle grinder, which was perhaps one of the best decisions I ever made. Once the piece of tile that would surround the toilet flange was cut, the rest went pretty quickly. Jes is the expert at putting down adhesive and tiles, while my expertise lies in measuring and cutting. With the responsibilities easily decided upon, we quickly got the rest of the floor tiled, which was much farther than we anticipated getting today. It was still a full 8 or 9 hour day, but we got every bit done that we wanted to, which I don’t think has ever happened before.

At this point, since we went with very large 20″ x 20″ tiles in order to make the room appear bigger, the tiles have to sit for 24 to 48 hours in order to allow the adhesive to fully set. The worst thing that can happen right now is that the adhesive doesn’t cure fully and one of the tiles ends up cracking under weight. Later this week, once the adhesive is 100% dry, we will remove the spacers and apply the grout. At that point we can get back to what we were originally planning on doing this weekend, and start putting up the wainscoting. Having only lost one weekend to the dreaded scope creep, I feel pretty good about that. There are a few more pics of the bare floor and the newly installed tiles below.