Finished the Dry Layout

This weekend is a little truncated due to a family emergency, but while we’re down we accomplish the goal of finishing the entire dry layout of the tile. When we start laying out, we purchase a cheap wet saw from Lowes to try and cut some 3/4” cuts. We originally were using a score and snap tool which worked well, but because you need to snap the tile after scoring, doing a cut that is not 50-50 is a little dicey. When you have an unbalanced cut, the tile sometimes will crumble apart instead of a clean snap. We get the wet saw and try cutting some finer cuts, but that quickly falls apart - literally. I didn’t realize that cutting mosaic tile with a mesh background doesn’t work well with the wet saw. First of all just cutting the small tiles is difficult because you can’t just feed the sheet of tile through the saw. You have to feed each tile firmly through and since the tiles are only 1” it doesn’t leave much clearance between your fingers and the saw blade.

The larger issue is that once the mesh gets wet from the water in the saw, the mesh completely dissolves and the tiles start falling off the mesh. After a few test sheets, we abandon the wet saw and go back to using the score and snap tool and also a tile nipper for smaller cuts. After much cutting and adjusting, we get all of the pieces in place with everything pre-cut.

Finished dry layout.

Before we have to run out, I also chip away at dying some more wood boards. This is just a tedious process because I have to wait for each step to dry completely so I have to keep staggering work rather than trying to knock out everything in 1 shot.

Dyed wood.