DIY Sarah

Craft, Decor, Art, Garden, and Dessert

Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 4

Before we could lay down the vapor barrier, Stefan and my Father built a half-height wall and installed the shower curbs.

The half height wall should lend some privacy to the toilet area. After constructing the frame with 2x4s, they covered it with durock. One thing they did do was to shim the durock on the top of the wall so that water will roll off the ledge instead of pooling on it. It has a nice slope to it comparable to the Styrofoam curbs. The whole thing was thinset in place.

Here are the curbs set in place.
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Click here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 1: heating mat
and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 2: SLC take 1
and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 3: SLC take 2

Sarah
 

Half Bath Floor

I mentioned last week that my parents were coming to visit. It was such a fun trip. I’m exhausted as usual but we got tons done. One of the quicker projects was tiling the half bath floor.

It was great to have a practice room for the penny tile. It was quite forgiving all things considered. If you’d like a detailed tutorial on laying penny tile, I recommend this post by Young House Love.

The basic rundown is spread thin-set, lay tile, get everything even, wait until the thin set is cured, grout, wipe with sponge, wait 10 min, wipe with sponge, wait 20 min, wipe with sponge, etc. It’s not a difficult process as long as you are patient with the tile and make sure to clean the grout before it hardens up.

Step 1 and 2: Spread thin-set and lay tile

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Step 3: grout

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Step 4 through the end: wipe and wait, repeat until clean.

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The grout we chose was a medium grey. I didn’t want to do white. I’m just not clean enough to keep it all white. The penny tile is a shiny penny tile and each penny is 3/4″ round. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the way it turned out. I had so much fun learning from my mother who has done so much tiling she’s practically a pro.

Sarah

    Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. Tiling the Bathroom Floor | | Craft, Decor, Art, Garden, and Dessert

    […] already posted some photos of the half bath and the master went very similarly but on a larger […]

Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 3

In part 2 of the bathroom floor underlayment, we poured a layer of self-leveling compound. I mentioned that it sets up really quick and you can’t keep touching it. Lesson learned. By the time it dried up it was a bit too wavy for our liking. So, back to Home Depot to pick up 3 more bags. This time Stefan and my Father went to town. We really learned how it works on the first go round and the second layer got nice and flat.

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Here Stefan is caressing his dead flat, smooth floor. Between the Self Leveling compound and all the tiling, there was lots of floor caressing this weekend. It helps to show your house you love it. It will behave better if it knows you care.

Click here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 1: heating mat
and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 2: SLC take 1

Sarah

    Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 5 | | Craft, Decor, Art, Garden, and Dessert

    […] down the heating mats. Then we spread a layer of self leveling compound in Part 2 and another in Part 3. Part 4 discusses the curb and wall for the shower […]

  2. Tiling the Bathroom Floor | | Craft, Decor, Art, Garden, and Dessert

    […] Part 1: heating mat and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 2: SLC take 1 and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 3: SLC take 2 and here for Bathroom Floor Underlayment – Part 4: Curb and Wall and here for Bathroom Floor […]

New Floor in the Closet/Laundry

We made a snap decision last week to pull up the floor in the closet/laundry room and replace it. The floor that was in there was in really rough shape and we figured the time to put down a new floor was before we added the baseboard and got the room filled with stuff.

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In retrospect we probably could have refinished it but we didn’t realize until we had pulled up a couple pieces. The existing floor was 1/2 in instead of the standard 3/4 inch which can make it hard to refinish.

There were 2 layers of flooring. The subfloor and then this floor which was under the 1/2″ oak.

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We pulled all of the top layer of floor up and laid down new 3.5″ wide oak flooring.

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We borrowed a flooring nailer and went to town. The 3.5″ wide flooring goes down faster but it’s not as flexible so It’s hard to get warped pieces straitened out.

At the end of the day, it looks great. Total it probably took us about 6 hours.. most of those in the wee hours of the night as we were trying to get it done. We were not expecting it to take us that long. That’s about how many hours total we spent on the kitchen floor which was HUGE in comparison.

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All in all, it looks great and it’s done which is worth a lot these days! Next on the list for this room:

  • Paint
  • Baseboard
  • Laundry Base

As always, I’ll keep you posted!

Sarah