Home Improvement:: Changing Vinyl Floor to Tiles (with pics.)

[Soh]

I always wanted to change the vinyl floor of the main bathroom to tiles. I thought there's no way I can install them by myself, so I went to Lowe's and got an estimate. It was like $600, which is about what I was expecting.

But I got slightly annoyed by the fact that the total cost of the tiles was $80 or so. Also, I had to take out the moulding, rip off the vinyl floor, clean the floor, and put the moulding back once it's done. Hmm...

At work, I talked to a few people who have done tile installation before, and they all thought I was crazy for paying such amount. I thought for a bit and decided to do it by myself.

I bought 2 books ( Working With Tile & Tile Your World. Both are great books) and one DVD ( Tiling Floors with Michael Byrne. so so, IMO) I also bought a few other tools like tile cutter, BOSCH grinder, level (although I bought a very good level, I virtually never used it,) a few buckets, sponge, trowel, Ditra , float, toilet bowl, toilet tank, and few other minor things.

Here's how it looked before.


First thing I needed to do was to rip off the vinyl. It was pretty easy using the hammer and this tool. I decided to do right and used a cleaning solution to take out all the adhesive, but I'm not so sure about the effect. Once everything, including the old toilet that was always clogging, is gone, it looked like this.


Since I'm only putting ceramic tiles (which means I don't need strong floors. Stones require more durable floor,) and there was already subfloor and underlayment, all I had to do was to put tiles on top of the underlayment, but I decided to put extra orange sheet called Ditra to make it even more durable. Now I think about it, this was maybe an overkill.

When I was installing the sheet, I kind of screwed up and wasn't able to lay the sheet flat. You won't be able to see the "bumps," but here's how it looks.


Now it's time to put some tiles. Because the orange sheet has a lot of small square holes, it was a tedious job to fill all of them with thinset (basically a cement) and put some more, so that the tiles and the sheet will stick together. When I looked at the book, the sheet was completely covered with thinset, but it was very hard to do so, as every time I spread the thinset with a trowel, the sheet appeared... Anyway, here's how it looks after the tiles are installed.


I let it dry for a day, and it's time for grouting. Both books that I read was making this job a big deal, but I found this to be a very easy and fun to do, probably because this is almost the last process, and so the floor finally looks real nice. Since you have to spread the grout not only between the tiles but all over the floor, initially it looks very dirty, but after a few minutes, you wipe them off, and it really look nice! Despite the fact that the floor is not completely flat, both the sink and the toilet sit on the floor without wiggling. Here's how it looks at the end.


By the way, this is almost finished. Because I put extra sheet between the tiles and the floor, AND made it bumpy, I wasn't able to finish this one thing.

Can you tell what it is?

I hope you enjoyed it because I sure did!

Soh