Monday (flooring, day 5)

 

Pictures in daylight

No grout yet. Just tiles.

Twilight

Over the weekend, I noticed that we had a problem with the shower valve. It was sticking out too far. I contacted our contractor and sent pictures. He investigated and discovered that the workers were supposed to install furring strips before attaching the cement board to compensate for the shower valve. They forgot. The picture above shows how far the tile is away from the cut lines for the valve. 

The solution was to remove the current cement board (pictured above with my annotations), cutting a clean edge between the wallboard and the cement board. The blue line above shows how tall the glass shower wall is.

The workers spent a good portion of the day removing the previous cement board, adding furring strips, and putting up new cement boards, pictured above.

First, the workers consulted with the tilers and decided to make the shower a few inches wider to incorporate the slope that the tilers are adding beginning at the right edge of the shower. The tilers also made sure that the linear drain was not going to be impacted. The new cement boards are pictured above. The wider shower will make the shelves and wash cloth hooks less crowded.

Now, the tile with a bit of thin-set (almost 1/2 inch total) will come out to the edge of the cut lines for the new valve.

The downside to this fix is that the edge of the cement backer board will not be flush with the wall as you can see above. The edge of the glass shower wall will go up against it and disguise the edge. The edge will be almost an inch thick with cement board, tile, and thin-set. Before, there would have been just the tile and thin-set up against the edge, almost 1/2 inch, so it's not a huge change.

Above the 82" shower wall and across the top, there will need to be some sort of edge trim. We were planning on using a Schluter edge (a thin metal strip at the end of the tile). I'm not sure that a 1 inch Schluter edge piece would look right. We may have to resort to bull nose tile for the edge. It's not an ideal solution and a bit disappointing, especially since I pointed out the problem with the large shower valve at the beginning of the project. The contractor assured me that they would make it fit. *Sigh*

The floor tilers did most of the laundry room. They improved the threshold going out to the garage by placing the threshold on top of the tile instead of butted up to it. Dirt and debris always got caught in the gap.

They tiled half of the hallway. Ironically, the smaller the room, the slower the progress because it requires more cuts. Tomorrow they will finish the hallway and laundry room and move to the other side of the house where the primary bedroom and bath are located. We will plan to be away in the morning. By the afternoon, we'll be able to get back into the back bedroom from the garage, but to use the bathroom we will have to go out the front door or garage and all the way around the house to the back bathroom door.  Fun, fun.