Tiling the Shower Walls

While Melissa mixed up the thinset outside, I attached a board to one of the shower walls. The board would be used to rest what would become the second row from the bottom of tile. We decided to start with the second row for several reasons. 1.) We want to install the shower floor tile below the wall tile so water flows down to hit the floor tile. 2.) The board could not be screwed lower because it would puncture the shower pan liner. 2.) Part of the lower row will have to be cut to accomodate our top-layer deck mud slope and because we don't know the exact height of the finished floor tile. Yes, these things take planning!


Melissa applied the thinset to the wall and began setting tiles as I ran in and out cutting tiles on the $88 tile saw we bought from Lowes. There were a lot of tiles to cut because we decided to go with a brick pattern. This brick pattern, along with a grout color closely matching the tile, are part of our plan to hide our non-square shower walls. Anyway, tiling around the window required 2 out of 3 tiles to be cut.

Working with the thinset sucked. The mixing process is long and ridiculous, and the thinset only allows a working period of a little less than 2 hours. This resulted in us throwing away most of our thinset and mixing a batch that didn't work because we attempted to measure out for a small batch (and measured wrong). The thinset drips down the wall and falls all over the place. It gets on your hands, which means it gets all over the front of the tiles you set, which means you have to try to wipe it all off after you've set the tile.

I don't understand why everyone says "tiling is the fun part".

Here's a picture of the cheap Lowes wet saw I bought. It comes with instructions that vaguely match the parts given. The people who wrote the instructions must never have attempted to follow them because they don't make sense. The saw also came with a warped blade. It was so warped that it would not spin because it would hit the table edge. Fortunatly, there was a generic blade in the box (that was not supposed to be there) that seemed to work.