How to Lay Floor Tile Part 3: Tilus Interuptus

 
That bit of green and the doors above it are the closet, which still had the original carpet. Somehow I naively thought I could tile right up to that point and call it good. No go.

So I had my mortar down and the tile laid up to about a foot away from the closet, then I had to stop and take the closet apart. Yeah, it would have been better if I’d taken the closet apart first, but then I might have procrastinated again, then who knows how much longer it would have taken me to get the job done.

Taking the closet apart started with removing all the coats, TV trays, and shoes piled inside, then unbolting the little pedestal built in to catch the mail that comes in through the slot. It was such a relief to see it was only screwed in at a couple of points. Once freed from the wall, it lifted right out. I’m never that lucky with home-repair projects. I can only put it down to pure luck.

There’s a little pedestal thing welded to the floor – OK, more like glued and bolted because it’s wood to concrete but I’m sure whoever installed it would have welded it in if it were metal We unscrewed the brackets on top of the pedestal that were holding the sliding doors in place, but otherwise left the pedestal alone. Which… you guessed it… I’ll come back to.

This left enough room for us to shove the bottom of the sliding doors in. With some wresting and a lot of grunting and I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but it did, the doors came out.

Now we could get at the floor. Yep, it took all day just to get there. The carpet came right out and left a nice, smooth, concrete sub floor just begging for some tile.

I was worried about the tile I’d already set as it was supposed to have a couple of days to dry, and I barely gave it one before standing on it wrestling with the closet, but near as I can tell we did not damage. I think this may partly be because I didn’t put the mortar on all that thick, just enough so the special smoothing tool thing left grooves in the wet mortar, so the bottoms of the tiles touched the concrete and were all nice and even with each other. Regardless, I wish I’d done the closet before starting.

For one thing, it threw my plans into the air. I wasn’t sure what to do with my decorative border. Should I run it around the inside of the closet? Use it to bisect the line between the closet and the rest of the floor? Both?

The tiles came out the wrong distances to make a nice edge between the closet and the rest of the floor without having to actually, like, cut tile. By this point I had actually played around enough with the tile cutter to know how to do it. I’d also messed up enough tile to know I’d have a hard time doing it right.

To make matters worse, there was that pedestal thing sticking up. No way I was going to mess with it. For one thing, I needed to have it exactly the way it was when all was said and done so I could reinstall the doors. But it stuck up far enough in and over to require some serious tile cutting if I wasn’t going to do the decorative thing.

It’s total hack work, but at this point I just wanted to get the project over with, so I ran the decorative border around the inside of the closet and filled in one, single, decorative square around the pedestal thing.

It looks a little strange, but I like it.

By the time I was done setting the tile in the closet, the rest of the floor was ready for grout.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from all this tile work. I’m going to toss out a couple of recipes in the next couple of weeks, then pick up with the grout the following week. Let’s just say it got messy.

 
Also see:

How to Lay Floor Tile, Part 1
How to Lay Floor Tile Part 2: Mortar
How to Lay Floor Tile Part 3: Tilus Interuptus