It has taken me a while to put up a post about what we've been doing at Runaway Ridge for the past few weeks.
We literally have been on our knees, laying tile in the two front bedrooms on the second floor, east end of the house (we refer to them as the Red Room and the Blue Room - you’ll see why as time goes on). I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a difficult, grueling, body-bruising job.
The finished floor tiles are Italian porcelain that we were able to purchase at rock bottom rates from a company who had previously been a supplier/installer for this product. We selected our tiles from stock they had left over from previous jobs. We were lucky to find such high quality materials, in colors/patterns that we could work with for our final finish schemes. After hauling 10,000 pounds of tile up in our truck, unloading it, stacking it and having it stored in the mud room of the house for the last two years, it’s fun to see it finally going into place!
The floor construction is a topic we will present and discuss in more detail in future posts. For now, it’s only important that you know that the tile flooring is the icing on top of the “layer cake” of the various materials that make up the thermal mass of our radiant floor system. The direction of the ⅓ offset bond was determined by the floor joist direction and runs East - West. This is the same direction and bond that we used for the gray tile in The Loft.
A “start line” was created in each room based on using a full width of tile against the larger gray floor tiles of the Loft in the doorways. These two bedroom doors open onto a shared alcove at the East end of the Loft. So, we realized that we should pay attention to how the bond pattern would look from room to room. We started the offset bond pattern the same way in both rooms so they are mirror images of each other. Jim tacked a strip of wood down onto the subfloor material in each room, a reachable distance from a wall, so Rob and I would have something to “push against” as we set the tiles into the mortar. With all of this pre-planning executed, we were ready to rock ‘n’ roll!
The crew of four (me, Jim, Rob & Kirsten) quickly fell into a routine for this installation process. Jim would mix the mortar; Rob would spread the mortar and lay tile; I was also laying tile; Kirsten was selecting, inspecting and handing Rob and me tiles as we went along. Jim was the runner for anything we needed and did all the necessary cutting of tiles.
Spacers were used to keep the tiles evenly laid and to allow for future grout joints. The spacers are either the tiny white things you can barely see between tiles or the big red hoops. Believe it or not, these different components created the same size grout joint. The big red hoops became our preference since they were much bigger, easier to handle and faster to put in place. They also came out easier later.
These tiles were too small to use the Spin Doctor components that we had used on the larger tiles in the Loft to adjust for surface alignment. We just had to develop the “touch” to set the tiles into the mortar and keep them level with each other. We encountered a few places where the underlayment boards joined unevenly. In these areas we applied a little extra firmness to set the tile further into the mortar and nestle it into place alongside its neighboring tile. And then, there were just some areas where we were going along so quickly we ended up with some unevenness in our installation (see RR Construction Highlights for more on this topic).
Overall, however, I think for a crew of relatively unskilled laborers, we did a heck of a job!
We had to complete these installations over several weekends. Since you cannot step on the tile until 24-48 hours after laying it, we could only work on sections small enough for us to bridge in order to get over the section and out of the room!
Once the tile was all laid, and the mortar set, the spacers were removed and the tiles were all wiped down to remove any mortar or dirt from the surfaces.
Anywhere mortar had oozed up between the tiles, it had to be chipped out in order to allow for the grout to be pushed into that space. The grout depth is supposed to be ⅔ of the thickness of the tile.
The grout comes as dry powder in packages with mixing instructions for ratios of dry mix to water. Jim would mix up small batches so he could apply it and work it into the joints in the floor before it would begin to dry, harden and become unworkable. His mixer is an attachment for his drill.
Applying grout is a matter of glopping on the mixture and pushing it into the open joints between tiles with a flat, spongy “spatula.” The suggested application method is to use a figure eight series of strokes, with pressure, so that you’re working it into the joint evenly from side to side. The final smoothing stroke is to be 45 degrees to the tile joints. Once you have the joint filled, you rake the sponge tool across the face of the rows to clear the excess grout. And then you repeat the process until you feel like you’re gonna pass out.
When the last of the grout is filled in you let it all dry and set up. Then it’s time to get back down on your news and wipe down the entire floor to remove all remaining grout from the tile faces. This took us three rinse cycles. At the suggestion of a friend in the trade, we added a little vinegar to the final rinse which did a great job of clearing the last of the cloudy debris.
