Well, I didn’t meant to be away for most of this week. Truth be told, I was so frustrated with how the work on the bathroom was going, and I just couldn’t bring myself to come here and talk about tile again. I’m so sick of tile. I’m tired of talking about it, photographing it, blogging about it, installing it…everything. I came so close to calling a pro in to finish it up for me, but I’m really determined at this point to finish the tile myself. I don’t know why, but the more I get frustrated with it, the more determined I become.
But what happened this week is that I had a vision in my mind for how I wanted to use the glass tile in the shower, and it just didn’t work out like it looked in my mind. So I spend yesterday undoing everything I had done on Monday and Tuesday.
The last time I showed you the shower tile progress, it looked like this…
My idea was to do one horizontal stripe of the glass tile around the whole shower. But as I explained last time, there was no way I could precisely line up a stripe of glass tiles inside the shower to perfectly match the glass tile in the wainscoting on the bathroom walls. So I decided to make them drastically and intentionally offset.
So I added a few more rows of the white tiles, and then added a row of the glass tiles outlined with the brushed brass Schluter strips…
At first, I was unsure about it, but I thought that was just because it wasn’t grouted. The appearance of tile can change pretty drastically once it’s grouted.
So after letting the mortar dry for 24+ hours, I grouted it to see if that would make a huge difference. This is how it looked right after I grouted it, so the glass tiles were still hazy.
So here’s the deal. I really did love how it looked up close. As in, when I’m standing in the shower, I loved that stripe, I loved the brushed brass accent, and I loved the shiny glass. Up close.
But when I stood back in the room and looked at it, I didn’t love it. It just didn’t seem to add anything. If I’m going to go to the trouble of doing that in the rest of the shower, it needs to add a spectacular accent, but this just didn’t.
So I spent all of yesterday removing all of the tiles down to the row below that accent stripe. And that was NOT an easy job. Let’s just say that the mortar I used is very good mortar. ? And once I had the tiles removed, I had to use my grinder to get all of the mortar off of the wall. And in the process, it also removed the waterproofing membrane that was on the wall. So now I need to recoat that part of the wall with the waterproofing membrane before retiling. Thank goodness I had only done one wall before realizing I didn’t really want that design on the walls!!
So after yesterday, it looks like this…
So basically, my progress for the whole week is that I finished up three rows of tiles and added seven new rows of tiles on one wall of the shower. I also grouted those tiles because I was tired of looking at dark grout lines. Oh, and I did get the “baseboard” tiles installed on the two other long walls. I just have one more wall (the short wall on the other side of the mural wall) to finish up with the “baseboard” tiles. So that’s my whole week’s worth of progress. At this rate, I may have this shower done by March 2022, and the bathroom done by August 2022. ?
Hopefully not, though. Now that I’m just going with solid white in the shower (yes, I know some of you are saying, “I told you so!” right now ? ), I think I can get the rest done much faster. I hope. I know we’re all getting tired of hearing about shower tile (and I’m so tired of working with it), and ready to move on to something else!!
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!
