The Adored Abode

Today I’m back with the third edition of Rookie Reno Lessons (see the lessons we learned about prepping subfloor for flooring install here and lessons we learned selected paint colors here). When we bought our home over 3 years ago we were renovation newbies. Over the course of 3 years we have tackled many projects in our home and with each project comes a few new lessons learned, things we would have done differently, and things we wish we would have known ahead of time.

This post is all about tiling. We are not tile pros by any means and I don’t plan on writing a “how to tile” post because there are still so many things we don’t know, but I did want to share the tips and tricks we learned along the way and the mistakes we made so you can avoid them yourself! We learned so many lessons in our adventures of tiling our upstairs bathroom that we just finished and I am sharing them all in this post.

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. For more information, see my disclosures here. 

Cutting Tiles

1. Get a tile saw. You can buy one (this is the one we bought) or rent one. The saw we got works great for straight cuts and even angled cuts, but we had a number of mitered cuts on our niche and a saw that had a few more capabilities like this one would have been worth the extra cost.

2. Tiling can be accomplished by one person, but it is so much easier if you have a partner. One person can measure and make the cuts while the other person installs the tile. In our situation Nathan made all the cuts and I installed the tile. The same goes for grouting. It’s so much easier if one person applies the grout and one person comes behind and wipes the excess and haze.

Wall Tile

3. Make sure your wall is plumb before you start tiling. We knew the corners of the drywall in our house were not square, almost none of them have been in any room, but we did not even consider that the wall might not be perfectly flat. The wall underneath this sconce has a hump and it was very apparent once we started tiling. Luckily this spot hides behind the toilet for the most part, but if we had know how much the wall bowed out we would have considered replacing the drywall before tiling.

4. When you have to match tile in a manner that would make it temporarily “float” to match up with another surface (like how we had to with where the wall tile extended out from the tub) use a scrap piece of lumbar screwed into the wall as your level line to hold the tile up while the tile adhesive dries.

5. This is probably common sense, but check, double check, and keep on checking that your tile lines are level – both horizontally and vertically. A longer level will be your best friend. For the most part our horizontal lines stayed pretty level, but we got off on the vertical lines matching up (every other tile stack on top of each other in the pattern we did should line up). I was able to squeeze the pattern back on track by fudging a few spacer distances, but I wish I had remembered to check this more frequently as I tiled.

6. Make sure you use enough tile adhesive to adhere the tiles to the wall. Again, this is common sense, but since our walls weren’t plumb and had a few “humps” there were a few problem areas where we applied the tile adhesive to the wall with the trowel, but it wouldn’t be enough to adhere the tile to the wall and occasionally a tile fell out after it dried. This meant we had to scrape out the dried adhesive and reapply. Not ideal.

Floor Tile

7. Figure out what you want your tile to line up with. The wall? The tub? The vanity? At least in our situation non of our walls are square, which meant we had to pick the most visible method to align our floor tile pattern with – the tub. By making sure we had a nice straight line along the tub the pattern ended up also mostly lining up with the walls too.

8. When you start with the floor tile work your way around and out of the room. Leaving the last part to tile right in front of the door. This way you don’t have to walk on tile that has not set yet.

Grout

9. If you want true “white” grout, sanded grout is not your friend. I did not even know I bought sanded grout (the labeling on the package was not clear), the label just said “bright white”. After grouting one wall we quickly realized the grout was not “white”, but rather cream. I did not hate it, but we knew we wanted white, white grout, specifically to hide a few of our imperfect tile cuts around the tricky corners in the shower we had to do.

10. If you do need to start fresh on the grout because you picked the wrong color like I did, know it can be scraped out. It is a somewhat arduous task, but it is doable with this tool.

These are our top tips if you plan on tackling a tiling project! Know it is doable if it is your first time tiling, but there is definitely a learning curve!