Master Bath Remodel: Part 3

Tile time!  My usual tile guys were busy so I went with another group and they turned out to be less than stellar.  For starters, they initially told me two, maybe three days.  It took them seven - only six of them working since they showed up one day without the right equipment.  Also, they NEVER showed up on time.  I don't really care when a contractor wants to get started, but if you tell me 8:30 don't show up at 10:00...every single time.  And if something does delay you, just call.  It's fine, just give me a head's up.

  

The first step in a shower is to use some type of cement board.  I chose Hardibacker, but it's probably all the same.  I asked the guys to use RedGuard to seal it, but they only put it on the seams.  It probably doesn't really matter, but it's just another example of these guys not particularly caring - or not knowing what they were doing.

 

When Branelle and I were looking for tile, we found an accent tile that we wanted to use.  It was kind of contemporary and sort of drove the rest of the bathroom design.  I told her (jokingly) that I was going for a sort of German Hotel Room look.  I got it in my head that I wanted a non-symmetrical pattern on the back wall, so the night before they were supposed to start on it Nel and I spent a few hours building the pieces.  What we did was cut the pieces out as we wanted them on the wall and then trace them.  We numbered each section and then numbered the back of the piece.  It was actually much trickier than it looks.

We took the pieces and laid them out on the living room floor so the tile guys could put it back together on the shower wall.  We basically created a puzzle by numbers.   There are 26 separate pieces of tile in the mosaic.

Here's Nel "pondering" the floor as it's going in.  

Slowly - and I mean SLOWLY - it started to take shape.  

I'm not 100% sure what I was going for with the mosaic.  Maybe some kind of "Joshua Tree" type thing. 

 

This shows the area that was created behind the cabinet we added.  It's a seat, but probably will serve more as a "product" storage area.  My hairstyle doesn't just do itself you know.

The floor uses small marble pieces.  They look cracked, but that's just the pattern.  Notice the sill - I told the guys to line up the seams with the 2nd row on the floor, not the one touching the sill.  They blew that, but they made a bigger mistake.  They actually made the grade of the sill AWAY from the shower.  That was idiotic.  When you're building a shower, rule #1 is that EVERYTHING must grade towards the low point drain.  I had to have another tile guy come fix it or it would have leaked water outside the shower something horrible.  

Gracie pointing out the obvious holes still remaining in our plans.

To be continued....