JDMCQ's Garage

Well now I'm staying

What type of tile are you using? Ceramic? Porcelain? Natural stone?

Do yourself a favor and buy the premixed thinset...so much easier to work with. Laying tile isn't that hard - just plan ahead, if you have lots of nooks and crannies to get around rent a wet saw, buy an extra box of tile for those 'oops' moments. grouting was the PITA

 

Sorry... I had to go to the kitchen

 

Tileing 101...from what I remember and its been a few years so their might be something bigger and better out there now...

if your slab is cracked or damaged in any way you may want to use a product like Schluter Ditra for an underlayment.

Ceramic and Porcelain are both pretty durable and good choices for bathrooms, lots of varieties out there to choose from

ceramic is going to cost less than porcelain

porcelain is denser and therefore tougher and if you do happen to chip a tile you won't notice it as much on the porcelain tile because ceramics have more surface glazes (coloring) applied to them so once that's chipped off you'll see the unfinished tile underneath. highly unlikely to happen but...

one downside to porcelain in bathrooms...it is more porous (due to less glazing) and will be harder to get stains out...from say, hair dye or nail polish.

natural stones...slate, limestone, are good too but would probably require sealing/waterproofing products

thinset...the place I worked at sold Laticrete and it was good stuff. This might be a case of something better out there...things change a lot and there may be a better product nowadays. depending on what tile you get you may want the white and not gray thinset...sometimes the color from the thinset will leach through the tile and you'll get weird blotches that show up on the top surface of the tile.

grout - depends on the size of the joints...thiner joints use unsanded, larger joints use sanded.

anything else?

 

typing!! have patience!!

bad language

you should sig quote that one

I'll help you...and ignore him

you going to chime in here at all or just sit there with your poppycorn?

 

Never used epoxy grout so I'm leaving that one alone... I spent 10 hours on my knees (no jokes please ) with a paint brush applying grout sealer to my kitchen floor in AK...miserable day!

ceramic or porcelain...what does the back of the tile look like? A creamy white color or grayish or reddish? white would most likely be porcelain and gray or red is ceramic. and on the top side sometimes the patterns are screen printed on and you can see the little dots that make up the pattern, porcelain doesn't have that.