We continue to make improvements on our rental house! Today we will focus on tiling the laundry room. This photo shows the floor, prepped for the tile. The old vinyl floor had to be removed before the new tile could go down. You can see the red scraping tool to the right that was used to scrape up the old vinyl and adhesive.
The space is small… a perfect do-it-yourself size! It’s about 18 square feet. We buy our supplies, including ceramic tile, cement for underlayment, a cutting tool, and grout. Planning first allows for a minimal number of cuts, so we lay out the tile to see how we want it to go. Mixing up the cement is done with an attachment on the drill, and according to manufacturers directions on the package.
Working in approx. 3’x3′ sections, we lay down the cement and then the tile, carefully spacing evenly between each one. The cement is laid down with a ‘trowel’… a tool that has a smooth side and a grooved side. First applied smoothly, the trowel is then dragged across the cement with the grooved side, to allow for pressure to be applied and for even adhesion as the tile is laid.
When laying tile, it is helpful to use ‘spacers’ to ensure that the grout spaces between each tile is uniform. We started out using them, and then just ‘eyeballed’ it, lining each tile up with the previous one. In the photo below, you can see the tile being laid down.
After letting the tile ‘set up’ overnight (be sure to follow the directions on your cement or adhesive package!), we are ready to grout. The grout is mixed up the same way as the cement, with a special attachment on a drill. We need even less grout than we did cement, so we’re mixing in a large plastic bowl, rather than a large bucket.
Using a tool called a ‘float’, we begin to push grout into the spaces between the tiles, smoothing and removing excess as we go.
After all the spaces are filled with grout, we take a damp sponge and remove the grout from the surface of the tile. Later after the grout has dried, we will wipe down once again to remove any last trace of grout from the surface of the tile.
All done! The finished product is a perfect floor for a laundry room. And much better to look at than the previous vinyl! Laying tile is not hard to do yourself, with the right tools, of course.
Have you undertaken a DIY project lately?
Blessings to you today!
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