Monday, April 6, 2015

Master Bath Tile Wall

It's going to be all about the bathroom this week! Specifically the master bathroom. It's in the addition of our house and it had the classic builder's grade look to it when we bought the house. 


It also had some water damage around the shower before we bought the house so we wanted to give this room a little facelift and fix the floor before we try and sell. Things on my hate list in this room were

  • The light - I don't think flourescent lights really have any place in a bathroom 
  • Huge mirror- combined with the mirrored doors on the closet you can always, and I mean always, see yourself in the mirror... once again, not great for a bathroom
  • White on White vanity- we fixed that a few years ago
  • Floor - I love wood floors but not in bathrooms
  • Shower grout - despite many attempts to salvage it, we finally bit the bullet and had someone come and regrout the whole thing
So we set to get rid of the ugly in the bathroom. We'll give you a run down of everything, and today we are going to start in with the wall with the huge mirror.

Initially, I was just going to frame out the mirror and try to somehow make it look smaller. These mirror usually are really well glued to the wall so that they don't come crashing down on you and I just didn't want to deal with taking it down.



This is when having a really bad install job comes in really handy. I finally took a look at the mirror a couple of weeks ago and realized that it wasn't glued at all and just held up by 4 brackets. They easily popped out and Nate and I were able to just lift the mirror off the wall. The mirror is SUPER heavy so we're lucky it didn't decide to kill us at any point and that we could now do something fun with the wall!

While we were at Lowe's I spotted some tile that was on a super sale that I really liked. Since we were trying to do an inexpensive facelift, sale tile that I liked was pretty much the best thing ever and we bought them out of it (they didn't have much left).


Our friend Desi helped me put the tile up one afternoon. She spread the adhesive (I got the extra strong stuff since they are bigger tiles) while I cut down the tiles with our tile saw. It only took a couple of hours to do the whole wall. I was a little worried that the tiles wouldn't adhere well since they are pretty big/heavy but I messed up the pattern a couple of times and boy were those tiles tricky to get back off! Those things aren't going anywhere.


Things sometimes work out in my favor and the base color of the tiles happens to be the same as the wall color in the bathroom and the grey accent color is the same as the painted vanity. I was super happy with how this turned out but in the store the tile looked much more white so I ended up having to return the white grout I originally got for a light beige.


I went with 1/8" grout joint and used an unsanded beige grout from Lowe's. In the past I've gotten the premixed grout so this was the first time I mixed it myself (and used unsanded).


It took a few tries to get the right consistency (I didn't want to mix the whole bag) but it wasn't too bad and I really like the unsanded grout in terms of application.


I broke the wall up into thirds and used a float to spread the grout and push into the joints. Above you can see the grouted section on the left and ungrouted on the right.

I found that for the size of the wall, doing a third at a time allowed me to go back and wipe off the excess grout before it dried on the face of the tile.


You have to make sure you don't get the grout joints too wet when wiping down the face of the tile so I find that you still have a hazy film on the tiles once everything dries (below on the left). Once the grout joints were completely dry, I scrubbed everything down (below on the right). It takes quite a bit of elbow grease but the result is totally worth it.


We added some trim at the top of the tile and caulked around the edge with the wall and we went from huge mirror to awesome tile feature wall! It cost about $25 in tile, $20 in adhesive and $13 in grout to completely transform the wall.


Curious what happened to the mirror? Come back tomorrow to find out! 
Hint: You're still looking at it!


If you want to see everything else we did in this room, follow the links below!

Repurposing the mirror into two smaller mirrors
Repainting the vanity
Installing the floor
Installing new lights
Re-grouting the shower stall

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