Hi Friends,

So I will admit, I have a thing for tiles. I don’t know why but every stinking time I’m at the hardware store I want to stop and browse! Even if we have no need for tile, you can find me in the tile aisle. You can imagine when we started remodeling our bathroom and I had a legitimate reason to pick out tile, I got pretty excited! If you missed all the lovely before pics of our 90’s bathroom you can browse those here.

For our bathroom floor we chose a wood look porcelain tile. I wanted one with some grey tones to match the future wall color and I we found one that had just that. We were able to lay this stuff in one night after work easy and grouted a couple days later with a medium grey grout.

I love how good it turned out! Next up, we started in on tiling the shower. (By “we” I mean “me”.) We chose a white beveled 3″ x 6″ subway tile for the tub surround. The tub surround tile was A LOT more difficult to lay than the floors. I’ve never tiled before so I went slow to make sure that everything was level and properly aligned.

I actually started by screwing my level to the wall so that it could support the tiles while I started on the second row up from the bottom. Everything was going good at first. Halfway up this back wall, my love affair with tile was over. My butt had gone numb from sitting on the edge of the cast iron tub for so long and I was tired and hungry. Even though I knew laying this many tiles was going to be tedious, I underestimated it. Eight hours later…

…one wall was almost done. Just to make things more challenging, we decided to take the tile all the way up to the ceiling. Am I crazy? Maybe… It was all worth it in the end though. The bathroom looks huge with the tile being taken all the way up!

Originally we had planned to use the same subway tile turned the long way down the side to finish it, but when I laid a couple out on the edge, it didn’t look very good so it was on to plan B. We ended up finding these thinner curved pieces to take down the edge and finish out the surround. They look awesome if I do say so myself.

Here’s a close-up of some of the tiles, pre-grout. You can see the bevel texture of the subway tile in this picture pretty well.

After 4 weekends of hanging out alone in the basement bath tiling, it was finally time to grout! We chose a bright white grout and we got the pre-mixed kind. Mostly because I didn’t want to mix it wrong and mess something up but also because I knew I wasn’t going to do it all in one day and didn’t want color discrepancies between batches. I used a grout bag (which is like a giant pastry bag for grout) to put the grout exactly where I wanted it and minimize waste.

The grout really finishes the tile off nicely and makes it look so good!

Here is my labor of love. Our beautifully tiled and grouted tub surround! I had Zac put the shower faucet in not too long after I was done grouting and I LOVE it! More on our faucets and finishes in the next update! What do you think of our bath so far?

Thanks for reading,