After three coats of sealer (I don’t want ANY mold getting in!) the tile is complete!! The total cost for this whole project was only $78!!!!! With a little resourcefulness and willingness to get dirty an extremely custom tiling job can be done anywhere!

Enjoy the final pics after the jump:

Well, it is actually happening… there are tiles on the wall!! What a journey I’ve had with this project. Laying tile is not at easy as it may seem. Follow the steps I took to lay the tile after the jump!

First you have to spread the adhesive to the wall, then you have to lay your panels onto the adhesive.

Since the side of the tub was so narrow, I had to mosiac it by hand to make sure everything fit perfect.

After I adhered everything I had to let it dry for 48 hrs. I came back and then had to go back over everything with grout.

A HUGE time-saver that I figured out with this project was using a freezer bag to grout with! Because the spaces that I needed to grout were so small using my finger or another tool to spread the grout did not work. I then thought of putting the grout into a plastic bag, cutting the corner and squeezing it out like icing on a cake into the creases. It worked amazingly; saved me so much time!!

The final thing looks spectacular! I have to wait another 48 hrs until the grout is completely dry then have to go back and seal it. I want to save the final photos as a surprise for my next post when I can actually say it is COMPLETELY done! Stay tuned…

STEP 1: I start by finding tile pieces that have straight edges and I edge one side. I then put two larger pieces on the seams at the other end to hold everything in place as you mosaic the strip.

STEP 2: Then you just work your way over adding in pieces as you go!

A helpful hint… find pieces with straight edges and edge your strip first and fill in the middle second. It is easier to fit in awkward shaped middle pieces after everything is edged. Its like a puzzle!

STEP 3: Finish your strip but don’t put it aside yet…

STEP 4: If your project requires you to make multiple strips and put them together like I am doing I have found it helpful to continue mosiac-ing the seam of the two strips. This helps for a much nicer transition between the strips when everything is installed. You’ll need to make up another set of drywall strips and connect it to the unfinished side of your previous strip. Then overlapping the tiles start to tile along the seam.

You can see how the tiles are overlapping when the two strips are broke apart. Once you have a good seam made you can disconnect the strips and put the finished one aside and continue working.

So why not just mosaic one long strip?? There really is nothing stopping you from doing this. But I find 1 foot sections a lot easier to work with then a 5 foot long section. My professional (ha!) opinion would be to follow the steps above with a more manageable length.

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…and finally an update on the project…

I’M FINISHED!!! I’m planning on installing it tomorrow (hopefully!). You’ll see a gap on the top. That side will be the far wall at the back of the tub. The wall is flanked by 90 degree angle corners on each side. This makes it very tricky to get an exact length of tiles. So I am going to install from the corners inward and then free-hand the mosaic tiles between the two so that I don’t have to worry about the strips of drywall mosaic being the wrong size. I am also doing free-hand tiling down the sides of the tub because of the same reason as above. I don’t want to worry about fluctuating widths and lengths.

I’m SUPER excited to actually install everything; hopefully I’ll do it correctly! I’ll keep you posted. :-)

As promised, some pictures of Thomas’ beautiful landscaping in our backyard…

… and also some progress on my mosaic-ing. I’ve been working on putting the tiles on the adhesive sheets and came across a problem. The sides of the tub are not even (of course!) so I’ve decided when I put the tile adhesive up I will just quickly mosaic right to the adhesive. The space is only between 2″ and 3″ wide so it isn’t that much to just tile right on the wall. Lets hope I don’t mess up when it comes to that point though!! Thomas and I were thinking it would be a lot better because there is no real exact way to measure that inconsistent width.

This is what my table in the living room looks like…

Part of the border is going to be a gradient from blue to yellow to striped tiles. You’ll see above part of that gradient. I’m getting EXCITED!!