Time for tile

Laying tile is a daunting activity to undertake as novices, so we decided not to learn as we go on the largest and most complicated parts of the house. After a lengthy search, we found John The Tile Guy — a local contractor and self-proclaimed “Tile Wizard” — to do the work. Over the course of 6 days, John and his assistant Ashby prepared our floors and laid down the tile that we had selected for the kitchen and the sunroom.

The sunroom floor, having previously shed its asbestos fiber vinyl was already set to receive the bright blue tiles we’d picked out. Eventually, we planned to fill this room with plants, so having a colorful, bright, waterproof surface would compliment that purpose.

The kitchen had been layer upon layer of vinyl, glue, and rotted particle board. To save a little time and cost of labor (and for the joy of productive destruction), Sarah tore through the multiple layers of the kitchen floor until it was the bare diagonal boards.

As usual, many surprises awaited us: missing boards, mold, a lack of support from where the sill plate had been repaired — what a mess!

But John was up to the job. He and Ashby arrived on a Monday and began with the easy room: the sunroom. Rectangular, with a preexisting solid floor surface, it was quick work that first day to put down QuickSet and carefully lay out the tile, keeping spacers between the sets to ensure even spacing.

The baseboard heaters needed to be temporarily raised and the front door needed to be shaved down by 1/4 of an inch so that the tiles would run beneath these. Using a dull-bladed tile-cutting wet rotary table saw and a specialty device called a scribe saw, John and Ashby cut edge pieces to evenly fit against and under our door frames and along the not-quite-square sections of wall.

Meanwhile in the kitchen, a sonic saw (like a miniature hand-held vibrating chisel) as well as regular old hand chisels and hammers were put to use chipping the rim of particle board Sarah had all but completely removed so that it was flush against the bottoms of counters and walls.

We don’t plan to replace the cabinets — they are built-in, in good shape and suit the space well — so instead of attempting to pull them out and tile underneath, John spent a full day carefully measuring and cutting sheets of our subfloor material to fit around the cabinetry. (For the subfloor, we opted for OSB, a wood composite, with a moisture barrier, given the house’s history with moisture troubles.)

But we do want tile under where the appliances are. This required removing the long-defunct dishwasher and the functional but aged double oven from their nooks so that we could tile that space. Based on the stains on the surrounding cabinets, those appliances hadn’t likely been moved (let alone cleaned) in the roughly 50 years since they were installed. Justin, who was staying at Rockleaf all that week, did the cleaning. John fixed the floor.

That first day’s work, the men found Rockleaf both hot and boring as they discovered the house lacks central AC, radio reception, and cell signal. The following day, John showed up with his own “spare” window AC for us to keep! Ashby provided the music, about which John (a 60-year-old former base player in a metal band) provided entertaining commentary.

John also brought with him an industrial-strength anti-fungal spray requiring a license to administer. He sprayed down our moldy planks by the back door, including the area underneath that is inaccessible through either crawlspace or basement. He and Ashby shored up our backdoor area that lacked adequate structural support, replaced the missing planks, and thoroughly screwed down a solid layer of the OSB.

There had been much back-and-forth about this layer of the kitchen floor in the months leading up. With the sudden boom in real estate came a boom in the construction and contractor industries. This in turn meant the cost of building materials had gone up considerably.

Thankfully, John’s business meant he had plenty of the next layer of flooring already purchased and in storage: the HardieBacker. Like sheets of drywall made of concrete and pre-fabricated with an embossed grid, John affixed the HardieBacker to the wood with the same quick-drying mortar used to lay down the tiles before Ashby painstakingly drilled them in place with more than 100 2” wood screws per 3’x5’ sheet.

John wanted us to see that the floor was going to be solid enough to bear our heavy tile, and the feel of those layers underfoot the night after they finished prepping the floor was as solid as the kitchen had ever felt.

Back in the sunroom, we learned that grout was not applied like cake bunting between each tile as we had guessed, but rather by smothering the whole surface of the floor with the stuff, rinsing and scrubbing the top to clean the top of the tiles. John explained the chemistry for me: the grout adhered to itself using lye, which would sink into the cracks when he sponged the tile with water, leaving a fine layer of “hazy” grit behind. This haze lacked the ability to adhere, and — once dry— could be wiped off with a dry mop, as if dust.

For the blue tile in the sunroom, we opted for a medium gray grout. For the kitchen, which would have a classic black-and-white checkerboard pattern, we went with black grout.

Another fun fact about grout: It does not stain! The color of the substance is the color of the pulverized rock used to make it. When applied to carpet, wood, drywall, or sponges black grout will turn everything a matte tar-black. But rinse with water and brush it off, and it’s like the grout was never there — it only set under and between the tiles!

On the final day, John reset the front and back door thresholds, lowered the baseboard heating elements back into place, filled in bubbles that formed in the sunroom’s gray grout, finished the kitchen’s black grout, and replaced the oven and refrigerator. (The non-functioning dishwasher, John and Ashby hauled to the dump for us.)

The end results are a stunning shift for our house!

To close out, here is a photo of the sunroom as we first saw it: