Making the Basement Less Gag Inducing

Some days you just wake up thinking that you need to lay about 300 square feet of tile in your basement to cover the pink and white vinyl squares that make your ladyfriend gag.

It happens, I know.

But I would say recognize how big a project you are getting yourself into. Cause this doozy has cost us two weekends so far, we are still not done and this is only about half of the basement.

Here is what this beast looked like when we started.



I carefully laid out tiles to make sure I knew how they would run from end to end and side to side. (Turns out my math was way off and this was a waste of time, but at least I gave it a go)

Then I broke out the tile saw and got to work. I made most of the cuts, while Leah handled the trowel and thinset.



We started near the fireplace, since we thought people would likely look in that direction often and as you can tell we used spacers in a totally failed attempt to keep the grout lines kinda even.

That is two spacers for each side of a tile, four sides to a tile and we put in place a whole bunch of tile. Let me do the calculations, that adds up to exactly 1.6 s*%t loads of spacers.



And one cat. Damn Ralph couldn’t help but be all up in our business the whole time. He has to be the center of attention. Unless the job involves fire …. or the vacuum. He’s not a big fan of the vacuum.

This past weekend we mixed up 25 pounds of grout, stuffed it into a “grout bag” (which looks like something you would use to put a frosting on a cake) and gooped all the spaces between the tiles.

It went better than expected and that usually means disaster. Turns out the light brown grout dried a chalky white, which means we get to use some special acid to take off the excess minerals. But that is for another weekend. If we wet the whole thing, you can see what the final product will look like.

We think it is an improvement. At least Leah doesn’t gag when she sees it.