TILE A SHOWER WALL---TUTORIAL

sharpie mark where all the grout joints are gonna be my spacers on either side of the tile so that you can get it in there nice hello welcome to tile coach i'm isaac ostrom i'm a licensed title and general b contractor from northern california coming to you today from denver colorado working on the shower for boat project and we're getting a really late start so we're just going to get a couple tiles set it's three o'clock in the afternoon uh first thing i did here was i made a story pole and if you're not familiar with what a story pole is it's basically a stick that you use mark where the grout joints are going to be and then you can use this when you go into the room and you can actually mark off where your grout joints are going to be i usually just use a tape measure i'm pretty good with that but this is a great way for a beginner to not mess up their layout so i'll show you how i do that first off i get got my my tiles laid out these are 12 by 24 porcelain tiles and these were donated by emser tile thank you again emser tile thank you so much for just being generous and donating this tile for this project really cool if you're not familiar with ems or tile a great tile shop great professional tile shop have all the pro supplies you need you can find them nationwide around the country so look up ems or tile show them some support some some love for donating to this project here so we got a 12 by 24 porcelain tile this is a polished porcelain rectified edge beautiful tile i mean a really classy marble look kind of has some taupe veins going on in it so you know that's like a warm gray so it's really versatile with the design and so what i did is i'm pretending that this is the top where my tile butts my ceiling and i line up the stick with the top and then what i did along the way is i just marked a sharpie mark where all the grout joints are going to be so this is nice because i can just take this stick and butt it up to the ceiling and i'm going to know exactly where all of my tile joints are so we got this story pole made now let's go inside and we'll start our layout okay so yeah yesterday we've got all of our waterproofing our hydra band cementitious so today's actually day four of this project and um you see our waterproofing dried beautifully um it's just a like such a nice flat surface it's i can't wait to start setting pile on it though but yeah so what we do the other thing you need to do is find out where your high points if you're tiling to your ceiling you need to find the high point of your ceiling because you don't want to tile up to the low part of the ceiling i like to have a full tile up top too if i can so you don't want to tile up to the low part of the ceiling and then cut in a sliver at the top so you got to find your high point ceilings are hardly ever level so you got to find the high point one way to do that you can either use levels now that we have technology okay so now we have technology we can use just a laser line and what i did is i measured to the corners the one corner is usually the high point and we got 57 and a half and if i come over here i got 57 and 3 8. over here is 57 and an 8 and over here is 57 and an 8. so this is my high point right here because it was 57 it's actually 57 yeah 57 and 5 8. so that's my high spot so i'm going to take my story pole and butt it up against the top and that way i know my layout's going to be right so i can just mark mark a line where my pencils are and go off there i'm going to make i'm going to mark my first full pile down here at the bottom so that's this joint right here my sticks all the way at the top and mark right there so that's going to be where my first full tile starts as you notice i'm going to have a cut tile down here these are 12 inch tiles about i got 10 and a half from my first full tile down to the floor so this is going to be a cut so i always like to start with my first full tile and then i'll set the floor and then this tile will go in after the floor reason being is is that i want to be able to scribe into the floor so yeah so i want to i want to set this tile after my floor is done uh that does two things if you're trying to stack a scribe tile down on the floor and use wedges because you'll always have to use wedges between this tile and the floor if you get too much weight pushing down on it it makes it really difficult to level and get these tiles where you want it but if these tiles are already dried and all you're doing is setting this tile it's super easy and you just stick it right in there throw your wedges in and you're good so this is where we're going to start up i will put a stick in just like this i'll nail the stick in right here and then stack my whole wall and i'll do that all the way around i'll do this wall first then this wall and then this wall or whatever since everything's plumb and level in here once we make a cut we're going to be able it's going to work for all the corners all my cuts are going to be the same because my walls as you know that's why i float them are all perfect and plumb and flat so i'm not going to have to spend any time you know buttering out with thinset or doing angle cuts because one of the walls is out of plumb we should be able to just fly with the tile install now so we're going to go ahead and mix up that multi-max light and start sitting here actually this is center of the wall we're going to skew it over because we're actually going to do a horizontal stacked pattern on this so this is going to be center tile and this is going to be the actual grout joint so what i have here is is some ring shank nails if you can find them drywall ring shank nails work the best and you don't want to hammer all the way in again this is a little bit different surface than i'm used to so we'll see how it goes but i'm not going to hammer all the way in just enough to hold it in place what's nice is the ring the ring shank holds the stick in place even though you don't nail it all the way into the wall because i don't want to nail too far into my float so these actually hold really tight without nailing them in very far give me a good setting surface to start off of since i am nailing through our hydraband cementitious when i go to set this bottom row of tile i'll probably take some more hydra band and just dollop it or use silicone or something to cover up those nail holes but yeah that should be good enough and if something starts to sag i'll throw a couple more nails in there okay so um the other thing i'm going to do is i'm changing to a half inch knot i'm aiming for 95 coverage in a wet area so let's see if we can get that with a half inch notch [Music] so no second i can see all my my ridges were collapsed behind the tile so now we got to make a couple cuts to go in here so zach's going to be able to just rip out all these cuts the same again because our walls are plumb and we'll get that measurement get him ripping those while i start stacking this wall so yeah if we go 23 23 and 3 8 23 and a quarter 23 and a quarter good shot yep 23 and a quarter okay so i got three rows up and it's important to check your level as you go not only i'll use my story pole but using a level uh if you're a beginner you might want to check it every course you do at least every two courses i did three and uh i knew since i had a level stick i was stacking level sometimes you got to add a little wedge somewhere on the bottom to bring it up but yeah you got to keep checking level you can see we're right in the middle our stability here so that's uh you want to get a picture that zach so that's what you want just keep checking it as you go we're using a nice nice eighth inch spacer i actually like the look of an eighth inch spacer a little bit better than super tight to me it gives you a nice full grout joint when you grout we're going to be using laticrete spectralock one on this so pretty excited and then also you can see from floating the wall we end up with nice flat tiles still plumb so just check it both ways and nice nice thing about a story pole to make sure you're not sagging and going to get into trouble as you get over here i can check it with my story pole too and see that our grout joints are right on our our um where they're supposed to be so the nice thing about a story pole 2 the story pole if you were putting like a liner in i mean you even put the liner in your story pole so you know exactly where everything should be it's just a real easy way to check where you're supposed to be the easiest way to get a lot of thinset up on the wall if you're using a half inch by half inch notch i mean that's a lot of order to get up but it can get really messy it can start dropping and plopping on you you see i'm staying pretty clean as i'm saying here use the the back side of your trowel to get the mud where you want it see i'm just kind of spreading it getting it where i want it first and this multi-max was when i first started using it i didn't like it i actually made a comment in another one of my videos about it being messy and it's just taken me a little bit getting used to of how to work it how i can pull my trowel around and like you can't just fling your trowel around like you can with other thinsets but it's a really good thinset it's saving me from back buttering it's so sticky and tacky you don't need to back butter your porcelain so that saves a ton of work especially if you're working by yourself and it has a long open time so the open time on it i just pulled up the specs 40 minutes of open time meaning i can spread it notch it let this sit for 40 minutes before i put my tile on there so you got to pay attention to that if your tiles if your mud starts skinning over you have to redo it so but anyways yeah if you get your mud about where you want it then you can go back with your notch and see how it's it's a lot cleaner i'm not i'm not um you know getting it everywhere so that that's one way just to help stay clean it saves time the cleaner you are uh the quicker it's gonna go [Music] it's really good stuff man i'm i'm really liking it the more i use it the more i like it i can margin trowel along the bottom like that [Music] because when i put my tile up here i'm going to squish it down and all these ridges are going to collapse so coverage is really important in a shower tcna wants 95 percent coverage meaning no voids behind it so if i just move it side to side like this it's collapsing those it's collapsing those ridges behind the tile you can see how those gaps closed up in between if i were to just stick it on there and push it those ridges wouldn't collapse all the way and then you can see i have a little bit of thinset that came sticking right here if you have a rag or a sponge and if you wipe that before you lift it up to put your spacer in now watch what happens now it's a nice clean joint that you don't have to clean out afterwards so you want to keep these joints really nice and clean especially with a highly modified thinset because when you go to grout it it'll be like trying to cut through steel with your knife it gets so hard so just just stay clean as you go same thing here's another tile i'm gonna collapse the ridges on it [Applause] and when i have thinset like that again i'll push it all the way over wipe that with the sponge first i'll take my margin trail take my margin trowel clean it off rag i like rags i use these blue rags a lot because i don't my hands are kind of messed up from having being in thin set water this left hand especially i'm kind of like all the skin has been worn off of it this one's actually good you can see the difference between my two hands and my hand got like that because of sticking in thin set water in the bucket all the time that's my left hand my right hand always has the trowel but try to keep your hands out of the water as much as you that can these these blue rags are really good for that they'll still wipe stuff off but they're not soaking wet i like these little spacers these hollow ones these little hollow spacers um you can leave these in the ones that are hollow so i'll push those all the way in so you don't have to take them out and here's my other side another cut and we're collapsing the ridges i'll scoot that all the way over to clean and before i put my cross in i never try to put these in first i always put my my spacers on either side of the tile so that you can get it in there nice and then you can pull it out and just push it in so i can shoot the laser and just make sure we're good on the laser we already have these pre-cut these side cuts and we'll finish up the wall we're gonna have to scribe into the ceiling because it's way out of level so we'll show you how to do that when we get up to it okay so we got up to our top row here you can see we had a nice full tile my story pole worked out this is jus this is a full tile not cut at all that's the high part part of my ceiling so that came out beautifully by using my tape measure i can tell now we start dipping down on the ceiling and i have a good way of marking a radius or i'm sorry marking angled cuts that aren't square what i do is i'll turn the tile upside down i'm going to get the face a little wet it's a lot easier to do when and i'll get my grout joint like so and then i'll actually mark a marking where i want i'm mark giving myself a grout joint here so check this out so [Music] i made a mess of my tile but it's really accurate when you're doing floors this is a good way to do it too so that's where i want my cut so if you flip it upside down give yourself your joint here mark it where the the grout joint is supposed to be right here mark it on a tile flip it back over and cut that that's a good way to get really accurate without having to measure [Music] all right so now we're finally putting our skirt pieces on the bottom so we got the curve all done we've got our base done we got our splash done and so this is the last thing we're going to do and again one of the reasons why i like to stack off the stick is if your floor is not perfectly level all the way around which we are really close like we're we're only we're eighth inch higher on this side than the rest of it the rest of it's all level but when you go to put your skirt piece up if we were to if we were trying to put wedges in here and what i mean by being difficult to stack on a cut tile like this if you were to put your wedges in here like this and put the whole weight of this wall on this tile on this wedge right here because of the shape of the wedge it's going to want to kick out at the bottom and all that weight you'll just keep fighting it until you're so frustrated that the wall keeps sliding down because this bottom tile keeps kicking out and i get that question a lot from you guys where do i start do i start on the walls everybody thinks that you start on the floor off of it and that's not the case so i got that in a good spot i'm gonna wedge it up and sometimes you really need to scribe to the floor depending on what that floor is doing you want that to be a nice clean joint at the bottom so you can get these cuts really good because you know that this line is level so there you have it i hope you enjoyed the video if you did make sure to watch the next video coming up you'll like that one if you like this one to see the other videos in this series i put links up to those videos in the description of this video so you can see the other parts to this series and last but not least i love you guys i love being your tile coach and we'll see on the next video

Channel: TileCoach

Views: 454,738

Rating: 4.8939991 out of 5

Keywords: how to tile a shower wall, shower waterproofing, shower waterproofing membrane, tile wall or floor first in bathroom, tile wall or floor first in shower, tile floor or wall first, what thinset to use for shower, best tile for shower walls, how to level tile, how to level tile on wall, how to layout tile for shower wall, what is a story pole, 12x24 porcelain tile installation, 12x24 porcelain tile shower, 12x24 porcelain wall tile installation, 12x24 porcelain tile layout

Id: aXXSzl6z2qs

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020