Tile Project

One of my (many) New Year’s resolutions was to make progress on some remodeling projects for our house, and while I have not been posting about the work, which, in hindsight, I should have done, Elly and I have been busy. We decided to tackle our second floor laundry room and dayroom first, inspired by the ominous banging our 20-year-old dryer has been making for months.

We have had the washer and dryer in our basement since moving into the house, but when we hired a contractor to build a two-story addition for us in 2004, we decided a second-floor laundry would be much more the thing. We previously did all of our own remodeling work, but couldn’t handle such a large project on our own. We still planned to do much of the interior finish work ourselves, concentrating initially on the kitchen and first floor bathroom and leaving the second floor day and laundry room areas for later.

Our first job in the two rooms was to install a compound crown molding treatment we have used throughout the house. More on that in another post.

The biggest project was to lay a tile floor for the two rooms. We previously tiled our second floor bathroom, but it was a much smaller space. We chose a natural, travertine mosaic pattern. The individual tile pieces are mounted on a 30x30cm mesh backing which simplifies installation somewhat.

I hauled all the material into our house on an icy, snowy day. Between the tile (13 boxes), five bags of thinset, bags of grout, tile backer board, etc., the combined weight was something like 1/2 a ton or maybe a little more. Getting the stuff inside was only the first step. We had to haul all of it upstairs, too!



Here is a picture of Samba helping with the tile backer board.



This picture shows a midpoint in the project after we had installed all the tile-backer board.



Here is a picture of the tile set in place. The laundry room is out of sight on the right side of the day room. We started working on the tile February 22 and finished setting tile on March 18. We only work on remodeling projects on the weekend, so it takes longer but our sanity remains somewhat intact (if tenuous). In our younger years we would come home from work and demo rooms at night. But, with experience comes wisdom. Sort of.



More pictures of the project, and of Samba(!), accompanied by detailed step-by-step captions, can be viewed in my Laundry and Dayroom Picasa album.