Tile!

Just this last weekend, we got started on actual tile work in the shower.

First we threw up some Wonderboard, which is insanely heavy and difficult to work with... But we managed. =) Then we filled the joints with mortar and fiberglass tape. The mortar was tougher to work with than the setting compound that we used for drywall joints. We let that dry for a week and then set about to begin tiling.

We used a "bright white" mortar (Flexbond by Custom Building Products) to set a bed for our tile. Its a thinset mortar so it takes very little mortar, much less than one would think, actually. The mortar gets raked with a toothed trowel and then the tile gets placed up onto the mortar bed. The tiles are tape faced into decently sized sheets, which really makes intallation fairly painless. The toughest part was aligning each sheet with one another ... and with gravity. Our level was our friend. Once a few sheets were basicaly set in place, steph would push them into place with pressure on a tile float. Then we'd move on to the next section, laying down fresh mortar and then setting tile.

We did half the wall before lunch and the half after. It went fairly quickly and was on of our best progress days since demolition. And that felt really, really good. =)

And, as you can see, I can't format this blog to save my life. Sorry about that. I'll make it pretty later.