Jeffrey Court Renovation Challenge: Week 5 Tiling

The Home Stretch!

Welcome to Week 5 everyone! This was has been one crazy, tiring, and exciting week! If you want to look back on our progress from previous weeks, click the links below!

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

And to head to the Jeffrey Court Renovation Challenge page to vote, click here!

We have successfully tiled the floor (just missing the grout)! For never tiling floor, or really anything besides the wall we did last week, everything went so well and we are SO proud of the tile! To be honest, it was easier than we thought, we actually thought tiling the wall was more difficult. The only thing that we thought made tiling the floor hard was all of the different sized cuts we had to make along the edges because of the herringbone pattern. In our opinion, it was easier to keep the tiles straight than it was on the wall. Lets show you all the progress!

Finished the cabinets

The first thing we did this week was finish the cabinets and add the hardware to them. We went with a matte black pull to match our new faucets, and other other accessories in the bathroom. The only thing left to do with the cabinets is to put them back together after we grout the tile! Incase you missed it, we painted our cabinets the color Blue Endeavor by Sherwin Williams! We have also decided to make the “fake” drawer panels functional, so stay tuned for that next week!

Now for the floor!

Like I said before, this was our first time tiling a floor, complete newbies here! We knew we would need a wet saw for all of the cuts we needed to make, so we rented one from Home Depot for 24 hours for only $28- super reasonable! Our floor tile we chose is the 4×12 Ashwood Porcelain field tile by Jeffrey Court and it is GORGEOUS. Its a tile that looks like wood, and it seriously looks like the real deal. Each tile is unique and different, just like real wood would be.

We started out by dry fitting the tile, just so we could get an idea of where we wanted to lay the tile, and how the herringbone pattern would look. We decided to lay the tile in a herringbone pattern so it would be the statement piece of bathroom and spice up the space! We wanted that “WOW” factor and we think the herringbone pattern accomplishes that! We’re so happy we did this, even if it was more challenging- you know we love a good challenge though!

This was our first time using thinset, because if you remember we used Mussel Bound adhesive for the wall, so we weren’t exactly sure what we were doing. So we may or may not have watched Youtube videos the entire night beforehand, thank goodness for the Internet-haha! We used the custom blend thinset from Home Depot in the color white and mixed it up ourselves. We could have bought it premixed, but it was about 4x the price.

From all of the videos we watched on how to lay tile and apply thinset, we bought the correct trowel for our tile size, which was a 1/4” square notch trowel, and we used the trowel in a straight line motion in the thinest versus swirling the thinset, this helps the thinset adhere to the tile better. You want to make sure the consistency of the thinset is similar to peanut butter, but a little thinner. If its too thin or too thick, it won’t adhere to the tile or could potentially crack and break later on. We used 1/8” spacers for our grout lines, because that was the recommended grout line size for the tile.

Honestly, once we started applying the thinset and tile, we just got into the groove and went with it. It took us about five hours to completely lay all of the tile, and make all of the cuts. And there were A LOT of cuts that needed to be made. I laid all of the tile while Ryan made the cuts and supervised (lol jk babe). We did stop a few times for dinner and to watch the Cleveland Browns (woohoo!) For our first time laying tile, we didn’t think that five hours was too bad! When applying tile you want to mix tile from different boxes, and flip the tiles around so you don’t create a pattern that is too uniform. With our wood look tile this was wasn’t really an issue though because all of the tiles are different, but we still mixed boxes!

After 24 hours they say its safe to walk on the tile, so the next day we went through with a grout saw and cleaned out the dried thinset that seeped through some of the grout lines. If you are anything like us, a lot of the thinset got pushed out from underneath and up into the lines, and you don’t want that to be there when you apply the grout. This was a tedious task, but one that was totally necessary! After we had the spaces all cleared out, we used our shop vac and a damp sponge to clean up all of the dust and extra thinest that dried on top of the tile. As you can see in the picture above, we made a MESS!

The last thing we need to do with the floor is to apply the grout, but we wanted to wait at least 48 hours before we do this so the thinset can completely cure. So we are going to save that for our final week so it can be a part of the big reveal! We are in the home stretch people! Everything is coming together and looks so good, we can’t wait to show you al! We just need to install the new faucets and shower head, put the cabinets back together and install all of the towel bars and accessories. ONE.MORE.WEEK!

Don’t forget to vote for your favorite designers and check out everyones progress! We appreciate each and every one of your votes! Click HERE to vote!

Check out the floor tile we used!