Tiling Tips and "Misstips"... I May Never Tile Again, but Then Again it was a Bargain!

My husband and I found a bargain on porcelain tile at Mardens, 99¢ a square foot. Not only was it a great deal, but the pros were starting to add up. I read reviews on how tile holds up well to water and sand. Since this home is on a lake, porcelain tile seemed like a great choice. We also had decided to install radiant floor heating on the entire first floor and tile is known to work wonderfully with that type of heat source. The one con is we had never tiled a floor before.

If you are looking for a quick floor install, this is not the project for you. However, if you are looking to install tiles to save money and/or this material suits your flooring needs, read on to learn from my experience... mistakes and all.

Lay some kind of cement backerboard over your subfloor to create a foundation for your tile. We used Wonderboard Lite, but there are a lot of different choices. We paid around $10 per board. 

Mix and spread out mortar. Make sure there is even coverage in order to have a solid base for your tiles. In this photo there are some places that needed to be filled in. This step is important in order to not have tiles crack. Screw the cement board to the subfloor using special screws. The Wonderboard had marks for where you need to use screws. Probably most brands have a similar design.

The cement boards should be layed with staggered seams.

Tape all of your seams.

Smooth mortar over the taped seams. Try to make this layer as thin and smooth as possible to make it easier to lay your tiles evenly.

We placed tiles ahead of time to see what the pattern would look like and to decide where we wanted the tiles to go. In my research, most sites said to chalk out a line at the center of the room. We did not do this because we were tiling the whole downstairs of this home. We needed to have a continuous pattern throughout the whole downstairs.

At 2:00 am we set our first tiles. That was an extremely bad idea to lay our first tiles ever while we were exhausted! We had the mortar too thick and when I went to lay tiles the following day, the tiles from the previous evening were higher than all of the rest of the tiles in the room.

Progress!

I found it easiest to lay down mortar beyond the tile that you are placing.

I layed all of the tiles that did not need to be cut first, then my husband cut all of the tiles to lay what was left.

Foyer

Hallway! We left places for us to walk so that we could get to the bathroom. We played tiles in the empty spots on a different day.

Twenty four hours later you can clean any dried mortar from between the tiles that you may have not cleaned up when you were laying the tiles. Then you can grout your seams. 

Mix grout and smoosh between the cracks with a float. Then wipe away with the float.

Go over the grout with a wet sponge making sure to wipe with a rinsed sponge for each small area. Refresh your water bucket often. The better you do this step, the less likely you will have a film left on your tiles.

I felt proud at this point. My first ever tiled floor.

One room down!

In this pic you can see the variation in height from the 2:00 am tiles and the ones I placed the following day.

Remodeling a Half Bath for a Great Price!

There is nothing like having a brand new bathroom in a home. My husband and I are probably not going to have enough money left over in our construction loan to finish two bathrooms in our new camp so we decided to go completely new in the half bath since that would be the cheapest one to update. We spent $482 total. Here is the break down. Light - (House of Lights) $63 Sink and Cabinet - (IKEA) $300 Toilet - (Home Depot) $99 Flooring - We didn't use all we ordered for the rest of the upstairs so we continued into the bathroom. So, kind of free. Pallet Wall - Wood: Free (Left over stain and polyacrylic from the guard rail project.) Joint Compound - left over from another project. Paint - left over from painting our house. Trim/Moulding - We have yet to finish the trim, but it will cost around $20.  

This is what we started out with.

Then what some people call the fun part, demolition.

Before and After pictures of the pallet wall. A pallet wall seemed like a good idea when I realized how
stuck the wallpaper was to the existing wall in the half bath... 

How to create a pallet wall:
1. Cut apart pallets with a saws-all/reciprocating saw. I purchased blades that cut through the nails very nicely. It wasn't too bad to cut the wood apart this way. Some of the angles are a bit awkward to deal with, but once you cut a few you will get the hang of it. I got a bunch of free pallets from my local lumber yards.
2. Mark the studs on the wall.
3. Choose pallet boards that are the same width as one another in each row.
4. Use a level to start your first row along the floor. Nail boards into studs when possible. When it was not possible, I would nail at an angle into the board that is facing off with the board that needs support. All of the boards sat nicely and became one until by attaching them this way. I didn't want to glue the boards to the wall, just in case some day I no longer want the pallet wall.
5. Work your way up the wall, checking that it is level every once in awhile. I found that how it looks far out weighed whether or not the boards are level. There will be gaps between some boards. Pallet wood is imperfect, but that just adds to the rustic flair.
6. I have seen it recommended to paint the wall a dark color ahead of time to hide the layer underneath in areas that the wall peeks out. In my case there was dark patterned wallpaper underneath, so I waited until I was done and touched up with black paint in spots that the wallpaper patterns could be seen.
7. Lastly I stained and put polyacrylic on the boards. I used Early American Minwax left over from another project. You don't have to stain the wood. It totally depends on the look that you are going for. I also left all of the nail heads from the original pallet in the boards and didn't worry about sinking and hiding all of the nails that I used to attach the boards to the wall.

Open the French Doors, Even When it is Raining!

Often in Maine a rain shower will cool off the outdoors when it is really hot out. Those are the days that you want to open your house up and let the nice breeze flow through your home, however if you don't have an overhanging roof above windows and doors, the rain will invade your house. A few years ago my husband and I decided to replace our sliding door with a french door and I also wanted to have an overhang so that I could open up both doors and let the fresh air in any time that I wanted. We enlisted my father for this project. He has built additions onto houses and knew what we would need to do in order to make the overhang structurally sound.

This is what we started out with.

We started off with making the supports for the two rafters that we would later construct. We used 4x4 pressure treated lumber and created a right angle triangle with lag bolts that tied each piece to each other and to our house.

Next we cut into our siding to build the rafter that would be attached to the house. This piece did not need the middle support piece because this was also lag bolted to the home. It was not going anywhere. We used metal plates to attach the pieces of the rafter to each other.

Almost completed!

We then built two more rafters using 2x6 pressure treated lumber and metal plates on both sides of the rafters to attach each piece to each other. Plus we used nails in a few places. This looks like a quick project, but this took us all weekend. You need to make sure to get all of the angles correct. After the two rafters were hoisted onto the support, we hooked them into the support with screws and attached strapping with nails to tie the whole thing together. At this point I should have stained first, but instead we screwed the clear roofing material to the strapping. It made my job much harder when I stained the wood.

The following weekend we switched out the sliding door for french doors. We also purchased
screen doors that roll out and connect with magnets. It is really nice because it tucks the
screens away from damage during harsh weather.

I love how this project adds some much needed angles to the home and breaks up the blandness of the back of the house.
Not only did this project enhance the function of the home, but it also made it more ascetically pleasing.

Thrifty can be Beautiful; Only $313 for a Guard Rail System Surrounding an Open Stairway!

During the past 18 years my husband and I have taken on various home improvement projects. With our first home, we were living on one school teacher's salary except when I had to take a part-time job in order to afford a new water pump for our well. Therefore our budget was extremely tight. The first home we bought was a foreclosure that was quite inexpensive. Our monthly mortgage payment on our first home ended up being less than we were paying rent on an apartment.

Because of our home improvement experiences from the last 18 years we have learned how to make beautiful homes on a tight budget. On this blog I plan to write articles that will hopefully inspire you to be creative while spending less. I will share with you a variety of projects from all three of my homes and hopefully future homes.

Before

For my first article I am going to share with you the second project my husband and I did at the new camp that my husband and I purchased this winter, a sturdy and gorgeous guard rail system. When we bought the camp the guard rail was unsafe and very typical looking. (You will soon find out that I am far from typical and like to think outside the box.) This had to be our second project to make the upstairs safe for visitors. Our first project was heat. I will share that project with you in a later article.

Before

The pictures to the left are what we started with. As you can see, there is a support bar across one side to the other. However, the bar really did nothing to keep the guard rail together. Also there were 3 lag bolts and 3 long screws in one of the posts because it had come loose and the old owners tried to fix it. The whole system would shake very easily and I would have never dared to lean against it.

After getting a little advice and doing some research on-line we decided that we needed to get down to the joists, or in our case the trusses, in order to make the support posts sturdy. So we began demolition and cutting into the floor. To find the first placement for a support we took out the subfloor. That took a very very long time! For the other two posts that would be connecting into the trusses from below we decided to make a hole in the ceiling downstairs in order to figure out where to cut a square opening for the post to fit down through and line up with a truss.

Did you notice how bundled up we were? All we had was a space heater. We started off with no water or furnace.

After demolition and creating holes for three of the eight posts, we were ready to begin the construction phase of the project. We fit the posts into the holes and took measurements. We used 4X4 posts. Some were hemlock and some were pine.

We secured the posts to the trusses. This is a picture of the post that we went down through the floor. The other two we worked in the ceiling from downstairs but did a similar process of shoring the posts up with brackets.






Then we started building the support system for the posts that were not going to be attached to the trusses from below. We used special bolts that are supposed to be way stronger than lag bolts, but I don't remember what they are called. One of the employees at Lowe's told us about them. We also used them to attach the bottom 2x4s down through the subfloor and hopefully into the support underneath. The box costs around $20, but we didn't use them all and have used the leftovers on other projects.

We then worked on assembling, sanding, and staining the base part of the system. 2x4s became the top railing spanning across the two center posts and attached to the two anchor posts. I mixed Early American Minwax with Ebony Minwax to get my desired stain color.

Once we had the base set, we started cutting the electrical conduit that would be the spindles for our guard rail system. You may ask why electrical conduit? I originally wanted to use steel cables, but that was looking to be an expensive option. I like the look of wood and steel together. I was walking around Lowe's and discovered that electrical conduit is $2.30 for each 10' strip. Wow! So, to save a lot of money we used the electrical conduit. It gives the guard rail system a slight "Industrial Look". 

We cut the conduit with pipe cutters until a generous neighbor lent us his electric saw that, as he said, "will cut right through the pipes like butter". He was correct. Once all of the 2x3s were stained and the conduit cut (we could get 3 spindles from each strip) we moved on to the last part of assembly. We cut two 2x3s to fit in at the top and bottom of each section between posts. Then lined them up and figured out where we would want the spindles. We marked where we wanted the holes and drilled the holes the size of the diameter of a spindle and the depth that we needed. We put the spindles in the bottom 2x3 first and then put the top section on and worked our way from one end to the other trying to make sure that each spindle made it's way into the top and the bottom 2x3 holes. We then used a rubber mallet to get the spindles in tightly.

We tested a 2x3/conduit section to see how well it would fit.

I love how the stain captured the grain of the wood!

We used L brackets underneath to attach the bottom 2x3s and went down
 through the top railing with trim screws to attach the top 2x3s. We pre-drilled
the holes in order to not split the 2x3s.

My daughter helped us one day. At this point we had a gas stove and no longer
needed our "Mr. Buddy" space heater.

My husband and I are really proud of how this project turned out. We have
gotten a lot of compliments from the many people who have been to
our camp so far. It is so nice to see a vision become a beautiful reality!

The finished product!