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The before-picture. The bathroom was originally hacked into a bedroom
closet, and was carpeted along with the bedroom. What kind of idiot puts
carpet in a wet area?
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After tearing out the carpet. The original floor was actually much nastier
than this picture shows. It's a wooden floor overlaid on 2x8 joists. A few
months earlier I reinforced the floor by putting new posts, pads and beams
under the joists to keep it from sagging. Don't ask me why someone made
those cuts with the circular saw in front of the sink.
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The new sub-floor. It's made of concrete backerboard and attached to the
original floor with zinc screws and mastic. There's a screw for every
black dot on the floor. It was very messy with all the mastic, and you get
just one chance to lay the board - I got it a 1/4" off. Don't even think of
prying it up after dropping it in place. The backerboard is very thin,
hard and flat - ideal for flooring.
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Laying the field. The tile itself was 1-inch hexagons with 1-inch mosaic
borders. Very time consuming, messy, and surprisingly hard to make come out
even. Even little surface irregularities can throw the rows off.
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The completed field. It took three nights for an amateur like myself to
finish.
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The finished, grouted floor. The grouting was the easy part. Getting the
grout haze off the tiles was tricky - I had to just test it every 10
minutes, and there's so much grout with the tight mosaic that it was hard
to not damage it during polishing. Here's a good tip - cover everything
with plastic to slow the drying. In a dry climate like SoCal the grout
dries so fast it will almost always crack. But it looks damn good! In the end
it cost about $250 but some of that was the cost of tools (nippers, floats,
etc.). It took a long time - nearly 3 weeks. There are a lot stages that
require waiting for drying.
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