Well it is starting to come together finally. I realize that all of the prep work is essential for the final steps to come out properly. It just took way more time than I had anticipated. Normally, when I give a time projection for a project we multiply it by three for the “real” time frame. We cannot be without a shower for three months. It is painful.
Mr Rainman and I were able to put up two of the walls yesterday. We have opted to only mix 1/4 bag of mortar at a time and this is working much better for us. We are able to stay under the thickening time. The screwy part is if you did this all the time you would be much faster. The first wall took us almost two hours but the second wall only took us one hour and it had more tile cuts than the first one.
I watched a bunch of videos and they wanted you to start at the top and tile down. We tried that, don’t ask why I even bothered, I saw it on the internet is my excuse. As expected it did not work and the tiles kept sliding down, this pesky thing called gravity was working against us. After we did two vertical sets of tiles I gave up, ripped it all off the walls and installed batten boards with a level after calculating how to get full tiles to the top and hide the cuts at the bottom of the wall. This worked very well and we will be taking them off, plugging the holes and cutting all of those tiles tomorrow. I will try and get a picture of the room after we clean up tomorrow.
The straw boss had to be consulted again today on a design change. The tile we got for the main part of the bathroom looks like a paper linen cloth. If you zoom in on the pictures you can see the pattern. It is really nice stuff and goes great with the floor. My plan was to use the shower wall tile to wrap the end columns of the shower on the toilet side of the bathroom. Now that I have seen the wall tiles I wanted to use them up the main bathroom side of the columns. Schluter makes these great metal transition pieces that will help us make the transition from tile type to the next. She stated that my alteration was her initial expectation. I will now be counting the tile to see if I have enough to do this as it was not in my initial calculation when we purchased the tile. Luckily, they did give us quite a bit of extra tile so I think there will be enough extra to do this.
Tomorrow the floor pan for the shower is supposed to be delivered to the store. I called them to reserve more of the metal trim to make the transition from tile to tile around the shower and niches.
Stewart Creek Somethings 