Day 8+9: Tiling the main rooms

Master Bedroom

After practicing on the closet, I was ready to tackle the first major room: the master bedroom.  I'd heard a good technique for minimizing layout errors is to tile a cross in the room (i.e. tile in the middle of the room, from one wall to the other, in both directions, forming a cross).  And do it using a layout line (or laser in my case).  This way, you know the tiles are straight on this line, and later when tiling the 4 quadrants, if you screw up one of them, your errors are limited to that one quadrant.  So I thought that sounded like a reasonable idea.  So I started by finding the center of the room (like I did with the closet), and adjusted that so that I'd get a "full tile" on the far wall opposite the entry door.  With this pattern, you'll never really get a "full tile" because the pattern is not square, but you can at least reduce the amount of cutting by arranging it so that the end of the room falls on a 6" boundary - so that the 6x6 tiles will just barely fit, and you'll have to cut the 12x12 tiles in half to fill in.  You can see in the picture to the right what I mean. 

Everything was working great.  One thing I am worried about is that near the end of the thinset bucket, the thinset started to set up.  I kept using it but I fear it may result in a couple of tiles not getting as good a bond as if the thinset were fresh.  One tip is that when you get down to about 25% left in a batch, re-mix the thinset (but do *not* add any more water) - mixing it up will extend the "pot life" and extra 20 minutes or so.  I did this up to 2 times per pot in later batches.

Everything was working great... until the 4th quadrant.  Somehow I got something screwed up, and as I was laying the pattern, tiles started to not line up right in one dimension.  The grout lines started to get thinner and thinner on 2 of the 4 sides of the 6x6 tiles.  I couldn't figure out where I screwed up (there was no one obvious out of alignment tile).  One thing I had changed was that I kept running out of spacers (I only had about 400), so in an effort to reduce spacers I started just using 1 per grout line (previously I was using 2). This saved spacers but my wife thinks that caused alignment issues (imagine a 6x6 tile centered in the middle of 4 12x12's, with a single spacer on each of the 4 sides of the 6x6.  That tile can potentially rotate slightly within its area). I think she's right, and it threw off a couple of tiles, and that error propogated and got worse.  Eventually, I could barely fit a 6x6 into its hole!  So near the end of the quadrant where the error was, I left out various 6x6's that simply looked wrong, assuming I'd custom-cut some to fit later on.  And I started using 2 spacers per grout line again :)

Pattern Continuity between rooms

We'd decided early on that we wanted to have a continuous tile floor throughout the condo, with no threshholds between rooms, bathrooms, or closets.  After I'd finished the first room (the master bedroom), the obvious thing to do would be to simply continue the pattern through the doorway into the next room.  But I was worried that the rooms likely wouldn't be "in square" with each other, and would result in the walls not being square to the pattern in the next room.  So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to start in the middle of the second room, and attempt to line up the pattern so that when the two rooms came together, the pattern would work out.   Well, that was a bad idea, because I didn't think it through right, and the pattern ended up not matching up in the two rooms!  Ugh.  Well, it sort of did.  It was "close".  I'll have pics later of how I made it look OK (but not right).  Anyway, moral of the story is, I should have just continued the pattern into the next room.   Doorways provide a nice "funnel" through which it is hard for errors you may have previously made to propogate.  So once you get into the new room, just concentrate on making a run of tiles across the entire room (starting at the doorway) and then complete the "cross" pattern in the second room as before.  This is what I did in all subsequent rooms.  For this one doorway, I had to fudge it a lot and make up a new pattern to minimize the grout line differences. Also, the spacing wasn't quite right so I had to custom-cut several tiles, as I figured the most important thing was that the grout lines were consistent, even if the tile sizes were a litttle smaller to fit.

I was able to complete the master bedroom and family room in about 3 days (not counting the tiles needed to be cut on the edges).  Next was the hallway and kitchen.