STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

I have no experience with this, but maybe he could have the tiles cut at home depot? He could figure out how many he needed to cut and then take them over to the store. I don't know how well that would work.

Elle wrote:

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Depends on what kind of tile you guys would be using, and how many cuts there are.  If there's quite a few cuts to be made (even straight ones), you might want to rent a wet saw.  Otherwise you can use a tile scorer - it scores the tile on both sides and then you tap off the part you don't want, but it can take awhile if you're doing alot of cuts!

There are some tile-laying videos online - I'd look those up and have him watch a few.  Much more helpful to actually watch someone do it a bit instead of just reading about it!

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We'd be using ceramic tiles.  And I was thinking there was some kind of tile scorer thingymabob that he could use.  I don't think there should be that many cuts, but we'd know that for sure when we picked out which size of tile and kind of map it out more.  Do you happen to know where and roughly how much it is to rent a wet saw?

We just put in a ceramic tile floor in our bathroom over the summer. It's not hard. You can totally do it.

You will want a wet-saw to cut the tiles. You can rent them from Lowes/Home Depot or a tool rental place. You could probably rent the other tiling tools too, but they aren't very expensive to buy.

My husband and his dad did our bathroom floor and counter top. One was the "saw man" the other laid them. But, if you spaced in advance and numbered the backs and then drew where to cut each one, one person could do it without much hassle.

You trowel on the morter, lay the tiles (use the spacers) and let them set and dry over night. Then, the next day you can grout. The day after you seal the grout (ceraminc tiles are sealed, so you don't have to seal the whole floor, just the lines of grout, you just paint it on with a bottle with a paintbrush tip). There, you are done!

Here's our floor. It was a small job, but we did the countertop too, and around the shower/tub insert.

 

HTH
-gd

We're in the midst of doing our bathroom and it is taking for-freaking-ever.  The demolition took us a lot longer than we thought and was messier and harder than we thought it was going to be, mainly because we had two layers of tile we had to remove and then instead of regular backerboard, our builders used steel mesh with concrete.  So we had to get all that out and that was rather tough.  

The difficulty of putting in the tile really depends on the job you're doing.  We laid our tiles on the diagonal and then added a decorative tile box in the middle, so we had a lot of cuts to make.  We mostly used the tile scorer, which works really well.  We only used the wet saw on difficult/small cuts.

I think what's taken us so long is the fact that we both work full time and only have the weekends to work on it.  Since we're doing the walls now and don't have gravity working with us like we did when we did the floor, we have to let each row of tiles dry before adding a row on top of it.  There's got to be a quicker way to do it, but I don't know what it is.  Also, another reason that it's taken us so long is that we took our bathroom down to the studs and then had to deal with plumbing issues and then once that was done we were able to start putting things back together.

All in all, I'm glad we're doing it though.  It's taken a long time, but I'm really proud of the work we've done and it's really kept the cost to a minimum.

ETA:  Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

-- Edited by NCshopper at 23:53, 2007-03-06

HeatherLynn wrote:

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Everything the girls said above sounds good. I have actually laid tile before. My dad retiled our entire house and I helped. We can talk later if you have questions. =)

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Hehe, B wants to know if you're coming to retile our bathroom then   Or maybe you can just supervise J/K