How To Tile A Wall (Shower)

hi Shannon here from house improvements calm and I'm back today to show you how to tile a shower wall okay so we're gonna apply ceramic tile to this this wall here we've already done the niche that's a separate video so if you want to see how to tile and shower in each then you can check that video out so with your with your tiling process one of the most important things to do is pre plan before you get more mixed and all that kind of stuff it's also very helpful if you can have one of these portable cross hair type Blazers as well because it'll save you a ton of time of your figuring out your layout and everything so so this one here I've got I can shoot a vertical line and a horizontal line as well you can see the horizontal line down there so I use that from my basic set up my layout to get things figured out in this in this case we're basically the majority of the tiles are gonna be these 12 by 24 's and I'm just gonna stagger them at a half tile sort of stagger so I just went ahead and figured out how I best wanted to set that up and in in our case we're gonna start with a full tile centered on the on the back wall we're doing the back wall first and then in our next row which is where the niche would have been there would have been the joint here so I just have to you know it'll go back and forth from there the Select said it's just important right and you can see I've got some marker lines here just as reference so if I bump the laser or have to move it I can find a mark again and get get myself lined up but it just will be way more helpful for you if you can do it that way you could simply do this all with a marker and a level and do the same thing if that's all you have but if you have a chance to use one of these lasers it'll help you out a lot so you can see we've already waterproofed the shower that's another video I've attached I know we're just dealing the back wall right now but we will be doing the sidewalls and and I would say that you should start with the back and the reason being that just grab a cup of small this is here the reason I like to do the back first is because from people coming in the bathroom can't see the joint actually I'll do it over here I guess can't see this back corner joint is easy if you do the back wall first so the back wall tiles will be back there and these ones will butt into it so the the grout drink sorry the kraut joint itself you see more from this angle instead of from this angle it just looks better hides it looks the more finished so that's why I always do the back wall first but those noisy suckers down so I've got got the mortar mixed that's another video as well you can check out I've got the first raw tiles cut here so that I can kind of get everything laid out from there I'm also going to be putting this quad rack metal edging basically trim work around the niche here so I've got that all pre-cut it's just cut to the inside measurements here of the niche of the niche tiles actually and then you buy these little corners that go into it so so this would be the bottom piece and sit on here in place and then you have your side piece sits down onto that corner like so you could if you wanted you could use a electric miter saw and you could actually miter these corners on these pieces and not buy these purchase these corners if you want to I just find that the corners make a nice thanks finish so so will be kind of putting these pieces in as we go as well I think it's important to mention with your tiles like I said these are 12 by 24s but not all tiles are actually the exact dimension these are actually 23 and a half long I believe and 11 and 3/4 wide so don't when you code them do all your laying out get a tile out actually measure it because you want to know exactly what it is and you also have to consider what you're using for a for a space in your grout lines we're going to be using eighth inch so that's all factored in there as well okay I think that's the main things I could talk about so I've just gone around and masked off the tub and it's got its plastic protective layer on it still so that we can clean it up easy and keep the mortar off of it we're using a modified mortar in this case because of the substrate we're going over which is a Detra aerosol right kerdi-board and so we need to use modified thinset with these this size of tile I'm using quarter inch by quarter inch notched trowel that's a little dirty because we were using it already for the niche but quarter inch by quarter inch and that should be sufficient for these tiles that we're using okay I think we're pretty much ready to start out so I've got my got my laser I've got it on the center right now so that's good and I'm going to just apply mortar basically from this row down for now just so we can get this row started and everything going okay so to first start off what you want to do is basically apply the mortar to the surface on the wall and and basically embed it into the surface so that you're getting making sure you're getting a good bond you don't want to just kind of slap it on and start notching it right away you want to actually get it and Craig Nate it into the surface so with the flat edge of the trowel we're just applying some air and basically kind of skim coating the surface I'm pressing it embed it into the fibers of the material that's here you can see already I've started to cover up some of the marker lines I had I don't have to worry because I I know with the reference lines I've got I kind of put my laser on again and get myself all lined up even with my marks go on okay so just do this surface so I'm not really leaving like any kind of a thickness there basically just troweling it flat off but getting it pressed into the into the surface okay so I've got that all pressed on now I can add now I can put some on there and actually put some trowel marks on it you know Tonya so I'm holding my trowel at about all around a 45 degree angle or so to the surface so I'm getting the full benefit of my height of my notches in my trowel so one all my notch is going the same direction at all at all possible yeah that looks pretty good and I like I said I've got this pre-cut hopefully it all fits in there this pieces my bottom I'm just gonna put a little bit of water kind of in the end of that and stick one of those ends in lined up there water just kind of keeps it from rattling around in there once it's all grow - did it be fine anyways but and just make sure I have enough more there for it long - I'll just basically get it in place I'm putting it basically flush to the top of here line up almost gently push it in there for right now okay now my first tile I'm gonna put into place like I said is this full-size tile but I don't want to just slap it on the wall the way it is here I want to back butter this back surface it just basically fills in the the texture that's on the back and make sure that you're getting a bond to what's on the wall so just get some on there and you want to use the flat edge of your trowel to basically kind of like what I did on the wall just basically coat the whole entire server [Applause] I'm not really leaving any amount of it there I'm kind of putting it on and taking the majority of it off getting lots on me it's gonna off words trying to sit here the right way and show you what I'm doing if you get any that's plopped over on the edge like that just try to clean up most of that as you go as much as you can I should have a damp sponge here would have helped and the styles going here so I'm just gonna set it on the edge of the tub just a little ways away from the wall until I can get it roughly vertical and then slide it into position and I like it now my layout here is a little tight normally I like to have a little more space than that above the tub I'm hoping I can get this 16th inch spacer in there just to lift it up off the tub a little bit so I'll just try to get it up on there like so make sure I'm not pushing this up too high I'm sure any mortar that I had at the back there losing out isn't going to be a problem lining it up where I wanted it the way my laser there so that's where we won our first one and we did get it up off the tub you can see that a little bit of space long bottom and we should be in pretty good shape there so now our other ones are basically the same idea so this is gonna be my one over here I'll just double check that it's yeah I got you short enough we'll do the same thing back butter the back position yes we've got back buttered you can see I've got basically the entire surface covered a little bit around the edges isn't but that'll be fine I'm probably gonna be in the way for you to see this one but I'm really just doing the same thing to get it in place and started you get a couple of these tiny spacers this isn't the space I'm using on the rest of the wall but it's just enough to get it up off the tub okay so this is where my my grout line that I'm really trying to keep equal and I've got eight inch spacers for that one how did you get going and probably kind of do it by eye but to get yourself started out it's a good idea to use a spacer make sure you're getting yourself started straight so I'm just looking at my Louisville line there looks pretty equal across here so that's good I had to pull my shim out down here because it was lifting this tile up a little too high on this corner which was making this gap uneven so those are the sorts of things you got to play with a little bit that's why I usually like to have a little more space here because most tubs aren't completely flat on that surface and if your tub maybe is not 100% level it all comes into all comes into play there [Music] no space there that tiles kind of rocking a little bit so I'm gonna have to build up a little bit of mortar in this corner so I'm just gonna pull this out to get it out and actually that's a good thing I did because I wasn't getting real good bonding you can see here on the tile we're maybe getting I don't maybe 60% if we're lucky there's a little bit of high spot in a couple spots the tile could be cuffed a little bit so we weren't actually getting any contact right there so I'm just gonna put a little bit in there I'm gonna trial it the opposite direction and what's on the wall just to help out a little bit and I need it a little bit more up in this corner to get it to sit right try it again I can already tell it's not rocking it's sitting better there okay so it's a good idea to pull one off every now and again make sure you're getting enough contact you want a good eating a 90% direct contact okay and I've got the same situation there I'm not going to put a shim in so I can try to keep that line as straight as I can it should be good there okay so now I'm gonna measure what I need four pieces here and cut them and come back and we'll put another row on okay so we did a little bit as you can see over here off camera I'm gonna do this corner really all the same thing get the mortar on the wall back to back butter the tiles we do have other videos on different tools for cutting tile so we aren't really showing too much in this video about the actual cutting but you can see our other videos on using wet saws and tile snap cutters and that sort of thing used to be this way [Music] and if your thinset sits on the wall or in the bucket too long us you know since you applied it or whatever it's a good idea to give it a mix or if it's on the wall comb over it again just to get it kind of activated again going on here I put my other top piece of metal on there as well in the corners little adjustment there there we go it's kind of hung up on itself here wondering why I was having troubles getting it to line up tight now that one's too wide I'll have to recut that tile I must be just a little slightly off centered so I'll have to recut that tile but I should be able to put the one above it I think let's do that here hopefully this one's right I should double-check it you know this one's gonna be alright [Music] okay so that one's okay throat space they're pretty good and that's over as far as it goes so I just need to recut that tile so okay we're back it's not the same day as you can tell there's a little bit a lot more work accomplished here since you last see me two seconds ago so what happened yesterday we kind of ran out of time yes as you know I'm human and I cut things wrong so as we went along yesterday I was putting some tile trim some magic around this window it's the end of the day I cut it all wrong and it was too late to go down and pick a new piece up so I didn't have any in the interest of keeping this project kind of moving and keeping the video flowing I decided to push ahead and do a lot more time off off screen so there's a couple things I want to talk about we will get to finishing this wall down around the plumbing and drilling some holes and stuff but I just want to talk about a couple things that I did go ahead and do over here while we are we so this trim is very common trim goes around the edge of tiles just to cover the edges you can see I have some actually right here on the wall so it's used quite a bit for edges or going around windows that sort of thing it comes in different thicknesses for your different thicknesses of tiles different finishes yada yada yada the most common one is aluminum so it's very easy to cut I always just cut it on power miter saw and with this trim I usually miter the corners I doubt that you can zoom in close enough to see that but I might or the corners in some cases you can butt them together but generally a miter looks better so so this trim I used around the window you you might want some kind of trim or a different tiled border the window whatever it is but in this because we were cutting tiles up around the window here we need something to finish that edge so this is the metal that I used and I simply cut it on a Meyer saw I cut it wrong and had to be corrected but anyways that's that's kind of how it goes on or what I did there now when I use this type of trim around the front edges here on a shower tub shower installation this is pretty typical about what I do I've got my waterproof membrane over and it's a boat I'm about an inch inside of the edge of the tub and then I apply this trim to the wall cut to lengthen apply it to the wall what I use is a little bit of construction adhesive on the back just a few dabs every 6-8 inches whatever I use my laser level and I get a nice line here I get it all lined up and then I use a little wafer type screw so it's a screw with a nice big wide head on it and I stick this to the wall with the glue and I just put a few of these wafers in it just to kind of hold it there till that glue dries some guys will put their tile on and then shimmy this little strip in there I'm not a big fan of that because if your mortars already dried a bit it's sometimes hard to get in usually end up scuffing up your wall and in my case I usually have painted walls by the time I'm at this point so I don't want to go back and fix the wall so I just glue it to the wall then it's already there in place I've got a easy measurement you know I've got to start in a stopping spot so that's the way I like to do it so that's that's that trim you can use that there's different profiles colors everything so okay so that's what we did around the window that's what I screwed up yesterday and kind of forced us to jump forward here a little bit so once I had that on then I did this mosaic tile this border which is the same tile that we used down in the niche down here it's got some glass it's got some kind marble or whatever that is there so these types of tiles typically come looking something like this okay so they got the jagged edges so that they all fit together as you go and they're applied on kind of a mesh mesh backing so that they're in a sheet so there's a lot of different things you can do with this you can see that I only used half a tile and all you have to do is simply decide how many strips you're using and take a utility knife cut that mesh and you can make this work out whatever sizes you want now just be sure that when you do that it works out that if you pick you only want three or four of these that you can interlock them all together like some some of them have a bit of a pattern too and you might be restricted to half tiles or maybe four inches or whatever so just kind of play with that a little bit to be sure that you can do it when you're putting these on just like I did down here in the niche I applied my mortar to the wall and then I put the tile in place and I used a float you see me use a float just kind of push against there a rubber float and it just kind of flattens out the wall and I did the same thing for these one thing you can't do with these is back butter them if you back butter them you just end up forcing that mortar through all those joints because the back isn't solid and you've got a real mess y'all already with these you'll end up with some places where you got mortar coming through that you're gonna have to clean out before you grow but if you try to backbiter this you're just gonna have a mess and it's going to take you forever to get it cleaned out so okay so cut it to the size that you want apply it to the wall use your float flatten it out and then bed it in in the mortar and you're good to go now something else with these tiles and you can see up here I've got a series of little spacers here in every one of these grout lines the reason for that is when you start stacking other weight on top of these they have a tendency to want to crush together because there just in that wet mortar and all that's on the back is that that mesh rate so they want to slide together so you need to put spacers all the way in there at the points where you're supporting the tile row above it so the weak kind of transfers through and down to this where it's all it again that's kind of a pain in the butt sometimes depending on how the day is gone I'll even get up to my border put it on come back the next day and do the the upper tiles so this has a time to set and I don't have to try to force all those little spacers in there in this case I did I put the spacers in to carry this weight okay then as you can see I just progressed up the wall I thought my planning was right but you can see I've got a little strip up above if I would have planned out better I maybe would have cut the bottom roll above the tub you know to three inches shorter so that I had a wider roll up there or something or maybe even one more roll of these would have been enough to make that not have that little skinny roll out there but anyways that's what I was left with I just took some more tile and cut some strips in there continued with the pattern that we've got and after it's all grown at that very top joint at the ceiling we'll get some silicone Anna okay so we've we've done that basically finished those two walls and we're around to this wall now and I even did this one chunk here while I was waiting for cameraman to be able to be available today just so I could keep moving but I wanted to leave this so that we can go through this more closely in detail so I've got my tiles cut to size for these two rows but I don't have any holes drilled in them so we're gonna go through that soo just fine set this so what you want to do you obviously can't test fit anything here with with the pipe sticking out so you've you've got a mark your point of this pipe here now like I said earlier because I use this as my starting point I can measure off of that I can measure off the tub because my tubs in straight what I could also do if my tub was a little wonky sometimes the top deck of the tubs are wavy you're not able to measure off them but if you've got a laser level or you've marked a line on the wall with a level you can also measure down from that so as a reference so I'm just gonna measure here and get a center point of this tubs boat pipe and what do I got there I'm gonna call that too many lines there for me to look out today so I'm gonna call that about 15 fifteen sixteenths so I'm just gonna transfer that onto the tile here so don't forget it fifteen and fifteen sixteenths and if I measure down from my line to the center I've got four and a half now this hole here doesn't have to be perfect because your most tub spouts the decorative piece that you put on there you know they're about I'll get two and a half inches or so around so I use a little bigger hole I think I've got an inch and a quarter hole that I'm gonna drill for this that gives me a little bit of play in case my measurements off where I go to adjust the tile and it's still gonna cover okay so that's gonna be that tile now because I've got the laser I can also measure up and measure my center point of this next tile as well okay so this is one and I know what my layout is this line actually I don't have it lined up with my s basically that's where my grout lines gonna be so I'm gonna have a tile piece over here just like what this looks like here they're gonna be the same rule was that okay so my tile is going to be here I've got a factory edge and a cut edge so that's this is up for me and I simply do the same thing I can measure off my my laser level their laser lines I've got three and five-eighths to the center three and five-eighths I can measure up off of there to you I've got call it five so that's my center mark there okay with this hole this is where the shower fixture is going to be it's a single lever you've got a big discussion plate that's going to go on here so this hole in this case the important thing is that it's big enough to allow this lip of our seal to stick through because it protrudes from the wall but poles still got to be small enough the discussion plate covers or any seal on the back of discussion plate covers so I had measured that already and I need my hole to be you know basically under five inches for discussion and I need it to be about at least four and 7/8 for that rubber okay so I'm gonna go basically draw out a four and 7/8 hole will come and test fit it once and make sure that it's gonna fit in case I need a little adjustment if you're not using a seal like this you have a lot more leeway you could actually have about a four inch hole and you'd be you'd be good as long as these screws can come through you'll be fine so so we've got those two marked this is up and we're gonna go out to the shop and cut these okay so this is our tub spout hole that we wanted and I'm going to use this hole cutting thing for ceramic tile glass that sort of stuff this one doesn't have a pilot bit some will have a pilot bit so you'd want to pre-drill a little bit of a hole here just to put the pilot in so it doesn't skid around when you start this one doesn't this is I think they call this a 30-degree bitter semicircle bit or something like that and the reason for it is you have to actually start on a bit of an angle till it gets biting into the tile and then you can slowly rotate and get your now these take a little bit of NACA getting used to because they will have the tendency you get going you get started and ulsan it wants to wheel across the tile so you need to be using both hands hanging on I've got my tile clamp down you also need to keep them down once you once you get it going there you want to cool it and keep it wet to proko prolong the life of the blade your protection eye protection I like these for these types of holes because I know I've got a little bit of play here so I don't have to be perfect but it does take a little bit of practice to know where you need to start in because I don't I have a center hole mark but I don't don't have a center pilot bit on here so you might want to buy one that has a Center pilot bit just for your your own use so okay so I'm going to start this and I've got my drill on just normal drilling action and in high speed it takes a little bit just to get started [Applause] once you have a bit of a divot there you can just get a little bit of water in that and that'll help it go a little longer you can see how the water stays there so I've got that hole drilled and I can just take a rag or whatever and clean the tile up you get a little bit of dust and some mud on there and you can see drills a nice hole okay so I'll set that I want us to the side now the other one I'm gonna do is this one here so I've got my hole marked out I just marked it out to the size I wanted so I have a line to follow and I'm gonna clamp it to the workbench and then for this one what I'm gonna use as a grinder and I don't have a guard on my grinder you'll probably want to have a guard you might want to use gloves but basically I'm going to use the grinder to work my way around that that hole or that line and I've just got to do a little by little and you'll kind of get the feel of it as you're going okay so we'll do this one [Music] so there's a good example of what can happen and that's probably because I had this clamp on this corner I should have maybe just had the one clamp on so we're gonna have to redo that this tile is super hard so I'm going to try something a little different too I'm gonna actually cut a little waste through on the backside and maybe that'll prevent it this one from breaking and I put just one clamp on to these tiles are really warped and I think it just had too much pressure on it hopefully that'll help us out here a little bit here goes nothing okay so that worked a little better and go give it a test fit okay so a couple tests and test fits later and we got got that all fitting for the big one that a little one fits fine so so we should be good here to go ahead and put it on so I had skimmed this out earlier today I had some leftover mortar so it's all been skimmed out so I just have to notch it now a little harder working between two surfaces now a tub and those upper tile okay it's one back better this tile I got to get out of the tub okay and I've got my laser set up there so I can get my height here lift the tile up off the tub just gotta be a little bit higher over here of course chain up with this one little guy and same thing with these two up here I always try to but my factory edges together looks the best to put your cuts against you know stuff like this edges and then back butter this one here a little bit awkward a little bit in there [Applause] just trying to get all the little goobers off okay so we got those couple in yeah just like that well that pretty much does it for how to tile shower walls so we've got this project to the grouting stage and we've got other videos showing how to do some of these other items like this tiling this nation those sorts of things so you might want to check those out on our channel please click the thumbs up if you like what we do here at host improvements com as always you can leave a comment below you can go to the forum if you have questions about your problem tiling project or any other DIY house improvement type project that you have and of course we're on Facebook Twitter and patreon so please check those all out as well

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 956,251

Keywords: DIY, How, To, Improve, house, shower, tile, ceramic, bath, cover, finish, tub, thinset, mortar, quadec, schluter, install, hang, trowel, notch, bathtub, installation, renovate, renovation, kitchen, backsplash, sink, counter, cabinet

Id: 4rgBFLqOAgw

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019