More Tile, Part II

Almost done now.

It's the end of Day 2 and we've laid almost all the tile except for the row in front of the door and the little oddball pieces around the edges. And we're pretty happy with how it's coming out.

The mesh backing on these tiles is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, putting down a sheet of 144 tiles at a time is a whole lot easier than gluing down each little coin individually. But on the other hand, the mesh backing doesn't stay square. Each one twists and stretches just a little bit, so they don't want to stay lined up.The farther you get from your starting point, the more out-of-whack they want to get. Normal square tiles don't have that problem.

Consequently, we've snapped a whole grid of chalk lines all over the floor, over and across, and we try to line up to those. So far it's working pretty well, but we've had to coax some of the sheets a little bit.

You can just see the gray heating mat at the very bottom of this photo. This is the same sort of floor heater we've got in the 2nd-floor bathroom. We like that one so much we put a similar one in here. It's the only source of heat in this room, and it'll be on a programmable thermostat so that we can set it to warm up in the morning and maybe for a little bit in the evening, too.