Wednesday (flooring, day 2)

 

The tilers made some progress today.

They worked from the living room into the bedroom. 

They made the last row of tiles on the TV wall without having to cut tiles.

We'll meet with the designer and tile boss soon to choose a grout color. The grout gap is extremely narrow. Our tiles are called "rectified," meaning they have been laser cut to exact measurements allowing for tiny grout lines. Typically, grout lines allow the tiler to make allowances for differences in size of various tiles. Thus the grout lines need to be wide to allow for imperfect tile adjustment. Not so for ours.

Bedroom progress

The tiler is very excited about the layout for the shower. He says it's perfect. The entire layout is designed for the shower and front door. He wants there to be two whole tiles at the edge of the shower, level with the floor. Then he wants the next row of tiles to begin the downward slope to the drain without a noticeable change in the tile pattern. The slope will be very gradual. If it goes as he thinks it will, there will be no curb at the shower door.

The name of the game is to cut as few tiles as possible. This bedroom wall is a rare row of cut tiles.

This picture shows how they used the front door to center to overall layout, with a row of cut tiles on either side, balancing it out.

Even though they had to cut tiles on either side of the front door, when they got to the wall above, they were able to use whole tiles on the next row. This is why it took them 4 hours before they began laying tile. They had to figure out the layout to minimize cuts and to create the most aesthetically pleasing layout.

Now that the clips have been removed, it's easier to see the color variation.

They removed some perimeter tiles that the demo crew were unable to get to back in September when we started.

Same for the kitchen. The demo crew left the perimeter tiles around the new kitchen cabinets for fear of damaging them. They used a big machine, sort of like a Zamboni, to pry the tiles up. We weren't here, but they said it was pretty loud and chaotic.