so to give you a brief deal of what’s going on…bought this place 1 year ago, need to sell to buy a bigger house, was going to throw a coat of paint on it to call it a day (ugliest colors ever, last owner lacked taste, and we never bothered to paint it), but my father in law offered to help us do serious renovations, so I said sure I suck at working with my hands (except with the ladiez of course ), but I learn quick

so it begins:

we ripped up the linolium that was in there…and there was the sticky paper under it, and we didn’t want to sand, so we started scraping with a scraper… this took a while

all good…only 2 hours of hard scraping…I know we would of probally been safe tiling over it…but fuck it, do it right or don’t bother

yours truly…actin sesssy

layed the cement board down…we need this and didn’t want to use plywood cause it will make us very high and price diff aint much

need to pee?

NEXT DAY….it begins

hands were too dirty to take more pics…and here’s the finished product..I KNOW we should of went with a darker grout…but the wife wanted it this way, and women will argue to death

we still need to grout in here…but we had to fix some tiles, so it got delayed

both washrooms disconected…had to pee off the balcony

very nice, great success

Turned out really nice.

We’re laying tile in the kitchen right now, so I feel your pain!
I think we have the same tile too. Porcelain tile from Lowe’s?
fanfuckingtastic. looks amazing. i wish i knew how to tile.
thanks guys

we plan on finished 1 washroom this weekend, and tiling the kitchen, ripping out 2 light fixtures in the washrooms (hard to explain but they are wrapped by wood,) and painting

so much work ahead of us, I hope it’s all worth it in the end

nope, ceramic and from home depot

we don’t have lowe’s in my area, so it’s either Rona or Home Depot

those ones were 1.99$ a sq/ft cdn
Looks great, its amazing the diff. a couple of days work can make.

I re-tiled my bathroom 2 years ago.

GREAT job! I am undtaking a similar project, but, can’t seem to create smooth(ie professional) grout lines. Can you share with us your method?

not sure I know what you mean, could you explain alittle more?

that looks hawt

do you just mean the spacing between the tiles? cause if that’s what you mean, you can buy spacers you can put between tiles

my father in law is OG, so he did it all by feel/visual…he layed a tile down, and moved it by wacking it with teh rubber bottom of a hammer.

now I just wish he’d teach me how to do it…I guess it’s all experience
Can you tell us how determined where to start the first tile? Let’s say the subfloor wasn’t level, how would you have ensured the cement board was level?

Did you have to do any pipe work?

sorry for not replying, I been busy

pipe work? nope none of that…I mean we installed a new faucet in the kitchen and had to cut out the old one, and resolder new connectors with flex pipes, but that was fairly easy…just make sure you dont touch the part you’re gonna solder with your hands, keep it clean and apply flux

regarding the first tile…well you gotta keep the flow centered in the room, or almost centered, so we visually put tiles down and decided on layout based on it being centered and convinience…notice the upstiars washroom it was in the middle of the door, it worked out that way, it would of been off a bit, but the main thing to keep in mind is to not start it in a corner…

so here’s what we did

decided on tile placement in the middle of the room, put them down made sure we were ok, marked htem with a line chalker (the center)…split up the room(S) into sections, put nail downs for center of area, and marked wall…started based on that line (not the corner)…did 1 section at a time, used a lvel to make sure it was ok (or in our case, we gave the walls a bit of an angle so it sloped the water, and just did it in sections…took our times, once we put a tile down we used the back of a hammer to adjust it…and buy the slowest drying thinset you can find

GL
btw, we’ve done MAD renovations since…before and after pics are coming up this weekend….I am very impressed with the way the house turned out

I put the camera in the car, I’ll take some of upstairs tonight and downstairs when it’s finished
Great job, did you consider putting some endtile or a cap of some sort on the tile that goes up the wall? It would reduce the need to caulk it and make a clean edge.

I do mostly accounting and number crunching now with my business but I miss dearly doing flooring and general contracting. It’s nice to see a house you built turn out amazing over amazing numbers on a spreadsheet. I actually used my brain more designing an addition over anythign I do now with my fancy degree.

we ended up grouting it…my father in law said it would look better then a cap, and it turned out alright, not sure how the cap would of looked, but I’m fairly happy with it

thanks for the tip though, i’ll check it out next project we do
so I finally have the pics of the completed projected

let me know what you guys think

pics are here:

Old pics:

New pics:

feels soooooooooooooo nice to have the house clean again…it’s been a mess for about a month