Laying Out Tile

The bathroom floor was leveled during the week and after a few days to cure, we’re able to start laying out the tile to test the layout. The floor leveling looks pretty good, although there are some cracks where the leveling compound slipped through cracks in the floor. We start by laying out the border of the tiles. To get the line straight, I use a laser level. There’s a few parts of the border that we need to trim so we use a tile cutter. The type we purchase is the score and snap style. This works OK when cutting straight lines and splitting tiles in half, but as we continue laying things out, we hit some limitations with this approach.

Laying out the border.

Figuring out what to do on the landing.

Next up is filling in the middle of the border with the 1” hex. The hex comes in sheets and the edges require some trimming to get half-hexes flat against the black border. Here things get a little tricky because to fit the sheets along with the 1/16” gap, we need to cut tops of the hex tiles off by about 1/4. The score and snap approach doesn’t work well when trying to trim off a little piece of the tile. When snapping, the scored edge doesn’t break off cleanly. We also try some nippers to chop off a little of the tile tops, but that is also a rough cut. I use a diamond sanding block to try and smooth out the cut tile, but it barely scratches the ceramic. It seems like we’ll need to get a wet saw to make these more precision cuts.

Filling in the middle of the border.

We decide to skip another trip to Home Depot and I focus on staining another batch of beadboard. I have about 8 packages of wood that I need to prep for installation. I also test out some of the wallpaper samples before deciding on an Arts and Crafts design.

The selected wallpaper pattern.