Day 7: Tile

Delivery and Relocation

The Lowes truck arrived at around 10am.  I met the driver downstairs and prayed his pallet truck would fit into the underground garage, because I didn't want the tile sitting outside while I loaded it upstairs.  Luckily it did, but there wasn't a great spot right near the elevator to put the stuff.  3 pallets of the 12" tile, 1 pallet of the 6" tile, and 1 pallet for the grout and thinset mortar. All I had was a hand truck that luckily also converted into a platform truck.  I placed a scrap piece of plywood on the truck to give it a flat base and cracked open the first pallet of 12" tile.  The boxes of tile weight about 60 lbs each, and each box was tied to another box, so I figured with my crossfit abilities I could just lift each 120 lb box onto the cart. Well, I lifted the first box, and holycrap that was heavy.  I wasn't sure how much the platform cart could hold, so I started with 6 boxes in the first load.  I had to move all floor mats out of the way as they would bunch up when I rolled over them.  I also rigged up a tie-down strap to serve as a pulling handle.  Box after box I loaded upstairs.  The grout and thinset was easy, it was the damn tile that was so freakin' heavy.  Finally, after 3 hours I had all the materials upstairs behind a locked door, and was ready to begin.

 Trial Run

I read a bunch of places that said the best idea is to dry-run a row of tiles across the room (left-to-right and up-and-down) to allow you to position it so that you can minimize cut tiles by positioning the grid so that you have a full width of tile across at least 2 walls.  Fortunately, with the size of tile I had, the grout lines would fall on 6" grid lines, so it wasn't too hard to do this.  Also, I decided to start in the master bedroom closet, which would be the *only* room with a proper threshold that I'd have to respect (it was this metal runner that the closet doors slide in).  This would give me a trial room to start in (and screw up most likely) and learn how to lay tile.  So I layed out a sample layout with the large and small tiles, and measured.  You can see in the picture to the right my trial layout. I found the center of the room, started laying tiles to the walls, then adjusted the center lines I'd snapped so that a full tile would fit on the back and right walls.

Once done I snapped a 12"x12" grid in the room to serve as a layout guide.  I was ready to start tiling! I mixed up the thinset using a paddle-style mixer.  That was a mistake.  The paddle-style (it had 4 rectangular paddles on it) mixer just about burned up my drill.  During mixing, my drill (1/2" dewalt) started smoking and getting really hot.  I had to be careful and took it easy.  It would never last through 36 bags of thinset.  Instead, you should use a spiral-type mixer (as pictured).  It will save your drill.  Mix it for a good 4-5 minutes, then leave it for 10 minutes to let it "slake" (or begin the chemical process with the water).  Then mix it again for 1-2 minutes (up and down, left and right, around, until there is no dry thinset powder, no clumps, and consistent).  It should not drip off your mixer, it should slough off and not appear overly "wet".  Have a second bucket with water in it to clean the mixer off after you mix each batch.   Also, mix it in an area you don't mind getting chunks of thinset on, because it will fly everywhere during mixing if you lift the mixer up too high (and you need to lift it high to get the top of the batch mixed).

I scooped 3 healthy scoops out and plopped it on the concrete, "near" my guideline, and starting spreading with the flat side.  I was using a 1/4" x 1/4" square trowel.  I neatly covered up most of my guidelines with the thinset!  I am thinking "what the heck did I lay these lines for when I can't see them during install".  Well, if you are careful and slow and do not spread over the lines I suppose you could use it.  I am not all that patient, but I got by.  I ended up using my laser line (this thing that projects a line across the floor using a laser) for most of the alignment.  I started laying out tiles, and used spacers (tavy spacers, much better IMO than the standard white cheap ones.  You can get them at Lowes).   Unfortunately all of my intersections were "T"-shaped, and Tavy doesn't make T spacers.  Being a first time DIYer I wanted absolute correct spacing, so I ended up using 3 straight-edge spacers per intersection, to guarantee alignment.  You can see in the picture to the left how crazy I went in the closet with the spacers.
I ended up running out of spacers the second day, and finally discovered that in one day I could go through 6 bags of thinset and about 1300 (3 bags) of spacers.  I know what you're thinking, "no way will I need that many" / "pros don't use spacers", but a) I am doing a multi-size tile pattern, and b) I'm not a "pro" so do whatever you want, but if you're doing a pattern for the first time, I highly recommend spacers. I also learned how to use the trowel, but would learn more about it later on (as I'll describe). 

The Trowel 

Your trowel is your best friend during tiling.  Treat it nicely.  I banged mine, scraped it on the side of the bucket and on the ground, and broke off a couple of its teeth.  Poor thing.  Ended up replacing halfway through the job, but I digress.  By starting in the closet (a rarely visited area, not much traffic, etc), I learned how to deal with humps and bumps, by "Back-buttering" or scraping on some thinset on the back of a tile (in addition to the thinset scraped out by the trowel).  When you lay down a tile, if it's sunken (with respect to its neighbors), just pull it back up (it helps to use a tool, such as a screwdriver or better yet a chisel, put it under the tile, and twist to remove), and backbutter the tile (either with the flat side of the trowel or the notched side, depending on personal choice and how much extra thinset you need), and put it back down.  It'll probably be higher than its neighbors so push on it.  This will cause excess thinset to come up in the intersection.  An easy way to remove this is to push the new tile against its neighbor (no spacer), and scrape the excess thinset with your finger then push it back to the right position (thereby sucking thinset down out of the crack), and put your spacer in.  I ended up using my finger all the time, and flicking the extra thinset down into an area I would be tiling soon.  Fight the urge to scrape excess thinset off your trowel back into the bucket.  Just scrape it onto an area of the floor immediately ahead of your working area.  You will not get a buildup of partially dried thinset on your bucket!  It's also important to remove thinset from areas that you won't be immediately tiling (such as the area near a wall where you may have scraped thinset in anticipation of tiling, but then a whole tile wouldn't fit).  Make sure to do it while it's still convenient to reach the area, otherwise you'll be playing "twister" trying to remove thinset.  I also went around the edges of the tiles with no neighbors so it wouldn't interfere with future spacers.  Using the flat side of the trowel is best to remove thinset from the floor, but in a tight spot (such as a 2" line of thinset against a wall), I found a much better tool was a 2" bladed scraper that one might use to remove wallpaper.  Make sure to reposition any tiles you move out of position when removing unneeded thinset.

With the first area done, I was ready to start the next day with my newfound knowledge.