The Tale of the Shower

Before we get to the tale of tiling the shower, let's see what else we have done to get ready for Michael and his family to visit for Christmas (Dec 11-27).  The most important thing is we bought 3 aero beds.  We are hoping we get water in the house by then, but as we were deciding what to do with our shower, we continued on with the floor and did some outside things as well.

Marilyn and Crissie went to the plant sale last Saturday to get an avocado tree.  Instead they came back with an orange and a tangerine tree.  They were out of avocados. So with Marilyn's Meyer Lemon tree and our orange trees, we have citrus pretty well covered.  And yes, they bloom and ripen during the time we are here.

Marilyn loves planting trees and she has a fine assistant digging so while we tiled, they planted.

The floor got a big boost as we finished the bedroom and started on the living room/kitchen (open concept)

First bedroom done

We bought a piece of granite to fill in under the wood stove and along the walls.  Should look good.

Just another gorgeous day in Waimea.  That's Mauna Kea in the background.

Marilyn, Luca, Marcus, and Tony relaxing on our Lanai.  Oh and Pono, the dog.

And now the tale of the shower.  It's an Ugly Duckling story.  Milton and Agnes came over last Sunday to supervise and advise on the tiling of the shower.  We had the wrong tile and needed porcelain, so when Marilyn and Crissie went to the plant sale, they stopped at home depot to pick up nehtw tile.  Milton approved so off we went.  What I thought might take one or two days, ended up to be a six day project that could have had a disastrous outcome.  So like the ugly duckling, ours had a happy ending too. I'll tell it to you with the pictures.

Now I'm not a professional tiler and have done some but never a shower and going up walls, but we started in the middle of the back wall using screws and washers to hold the tile in place while the thin set dried.  Looks like a good beginning but...

We had two problems - how to trim the niche and how to trim the window.  There was no bullnose to match the large tiles, So Crissie bought some bullnose to match but it was thinner than the big tile, so we would have to build it out somehow and as you can see the corners would have to be mitered at 45 degrees.  We mocked it up to see how it would look and proceeded to throw up.  How would we hide the edges of the main tile?

Then the answer came to us.  Why bother to hide it.  Take all that "fake" bullnose back and just butt up the tiles and sand the edges and they'll look fine.  We did have to take some down, thankfully it hadn't dried yet and pretty much solved the problem.

So we just went around the window and niche and it worked fine.  The window is a little off center, so that's why you see the two small pieces on the left of it to maintain the vertical line.

And voila!  Here is our "swan" shower grouted and ready for fixtures.

I don't think I ever want to tile again.  I'm going back to the floor, it's a lot easier.