by ll

A Pile of Tile

While the several weeks of steps for drywall was going on, they started working on tile in the bathrooms. I had a lot of simple, white, 3×6 subway tile in my plan. The house was originally built in 1926, so I was trying to stick with that era generally in my designs. I think I bought about the cheapest subway tile available, but it is clean and simple. I jumped on the hex bandwagon for the floor tile and used a large black hex for the master and small black hex for the other two bathrooms. It took 2 guys about week to tile the floor, full shower walls, and about halfway up in sink areas in each bathroom.

Yea, it’s sort of boring, but I have seen my share of dated tile bathrooms so hoping this is neutral enough that I won’t be sick of it in 5 years!

Our tile guy knew what he was doing, but I don’t think he was a super pro or anything. I was really impressed with a couple finished trim edges he pulled together though. Corners can be tricky!

They also tiled the floor in the mudroom with a cheap black slate tile that is pretty close to the tile that we have in the front entrance.

The grout though…

I’ve heard a lot about this new acrylic grout that is suppose to completely repel water and mildew that is very appealing to me with all this tile! The general contractor hasn’t worked with it though and is skeptical. I’ve had traditional cement grout in a shower before and it was terrible to clean so really hoping to give this stuff a shot.

I bought some of the pre-mixed acrylic grout and talked to the guy actually doing the tiling. He was okay with trying it, but I am not really sure he understood the directions. The pre-mixed acrylic grout dries faster than traditional and supposedly is hard to wipe off the tile face after it dries (unlike traditional sanded cement grout). It did seem a little harder for him to apply, but I didn’t really notice any issues with residue on the tile face. I was doing white grout on white tile though so maybe it was just less obvious.

Ultimately we went with a hybrid product, sanded grout with added polymers (Mapei Keracolor sanded grout). We ALSO used the Mapei Grout Maximizer instead of water when preparing the grout. This got expensive, but hopefully time saved on tile cleaning down the line will be worth it!!