Bella's Bathroom Tile

The Princess wanted pretty much every square inch of her palace tiled.  We didn't do that...  The final plan was to do the floor and baseboards from tile.  This was a travertine (a natural limestone) which was very difficult to get.  The tile store ended up having to pull in bits and pieces from several stores to get enough for our small bathroom order.  Apparently is was very popular/discontinued/no longer in production/etc so it was a tough thing to get, but they did a lot of work finding it for us (The Tile Shop in Woodbury - thanks!).  Now the Princess wanted something more than ordinary, so we settled on a field of the travertine in a running bond pattern, with a 2" border of glass tiles set in a couple inches from the perimeter.  This was very complicated to do, and frankly it took me longer to do this bathroom than it did to do the entire kitchen and laundry room.  But in the end it looks goooood, so we'll roll with it....

Here's the subfloor and the "Ditra" tile substrate.  I knew I was going to end up higher than the wood floor, so I used this to keep the difference to a minimum.  I had to add an additional subfloor to meet tile specs for natural stone, so I added the minimum (again due to the difference in floor height) so here is 3/8" plywood screwed down:

Now you might be asking why there are 2 sets of screw holes through much of this.  I was most of the way done,l and a cold chill enveloped me - I had forgotten about the radiant tubing below the floor.  CRAP!  So I pulled out the screws that were slightly too long and replaced them with shorter screws next to them and hoped I had not hit tubing.  I tested it a couple weeks later and was sunk - it leaked down like crazy, so it was clear that I hit the tubing, probably multiple times.  So I lost a zone in the radiant, which is unfortunate as the bathrooms are the nicest places to have that running.  Ah well, nothing I can do now...

So here is laying out the tile to see what it would look like:

Seemed to fit the room well, so it was time to move ahead.  Here is the orange "Ditra" stuff that is the tile backer:

Then after sticking that down I started with the perimeter 2" or so in travertine.  I needed that down as a baseline to work from.  The glass tile will not dive into the linen closet as it is not visible, so it will basically trace the room as normally seen.

The next step is placing the field while still maintaining the necessary spacing for the glass tile accent.  This took an extra day to let some stuff cure before walking on it to get back into the nooks.  Behind the toilet I let the glass runout straight into the wall as there is no need to trace the wall behind the toilet, and it helped aligning the pattern.

Next up was the baseboard.  I struggled with how to make this look right.  Leaving the top edge square would not look good.  It needed a round over or something.  I ended up figuring out a bevel that i could cut on the tile saw that made it look a lot better.  Here is the jig I made for that.

Just enough to hold the tile and still clear the saw (barely).  So here is the baseboard in place:

Now finally on to the glass accents.  Like I said, this took longer than the entire kitchen and laundry room...  I'll spare you most of the details, but suffice it to say that not everything lined up perfectly, so there was some fitting that had to happen, and the joint behind the door to the BR is where some "slop" had to occur.  Someday there will be a door there so it will not be visible.

So the Princess is fully ensconced in her tower now...except the sink was still pretty much thrown together to get her "something" and it was a sink I picked up on the way home one day as it was sitting by the curb near our old house.  Perfect to make it work for the interim, and the price is right!  I don't have pics of the whole thing completed, but I got it done before we moved in in August.

Flash forward to August: Then the entertaining part happened.  A day into living in the new house, and the upstairs bathroom didn't flush or drain right. This was Sat, so I called the plumber and waited to hear.  Mon AM I get a call back from the boss "weeeellll it could be anything, probably some construction debris in the pipes, and we really don't do repairs, but I'll send out the guy who worked on it to check it out and make sure it isn't our fault"  Gee how could there be debris in the pipes when I have been the only person working on this the past couple years, and the plumbers were religious about taping off the drain pipes?  Hmmm.  So the plumber that did most of the work shows up at the end of the day and he figures it out pretty quick.  He forgot to connect the standpipe from the upper floor to the drain stack!  So it filled up with water from testing and then a little use, and then finally wouldn't drain at all (not that it really was draining, just filling up).  So this sorry sack had the fun part of draining out a 2 story 3" pipe that was full of water..and worse.  But of course, had he connected it up in the first place, none of this would have happened.  So he got it connected and finally all was working.  And these are the professionals!  Wonder why I do things myself?  In his defense, he said "Well I cannot blame anyone but myself for this and I am sorry".  He fixed it without bleating about it, so I said "No worries.  If you blame yourself, nobody is going to argue with you."  He agreed.  And all is working now.  Like it would have been if I did it myself.  For $10k less.  The first time. Unions...the scourge of America.