How to Tile a Floor and Remodel a Half-bath

In the picture below, take a look at the patch of wall paper that is right behind my head.  You can’t see the detail, but the pattern is tiny Christmas trees.  Previous owners had covered the whole bathroom and family room with this awful stuff.  Rather than rip it all down since they did such a nice job of gluing the wallpaper up, I decided to leave it and paint over.  Prior to paining I used 4 cans of aerosol spray texture to put texture on the walls right over the paper.  It worked real well and you can’t even tell there was wallpaper anymore.

Also in the picture below, you’ll see that I had ripped up the wood floor that was glued to the concrete and removed baseboards.  When you do this there will be old glue left behind that you need to remove prior to tiling a new floor.  So what you see here is I’m using a heavy duty solvent/stripper on the floor to dissolve away old glue and grime.  This stuff is very toxic, so note the gloves which are special solvent resistant, and goggles to protect the eyes.  What you don’t see is I also have two fans running to blow the fumes away.  I would strongly recommend using a respirator here, but I took a shortcut.

So with the solvent you scrub it on with a brush and leave it for a half hour or so and then reapply.  Then wash it off with water and rags.  I had to scrub quite a bit to get off all the old glue.  You can also see here I have painted myself into a corner.

After all the glue and grime is removed from the concrete subfloor, you have to prepare the concrete for tiles by fixing any cracks or uneven spots.  Use a carpenter’s level to find any uneven spots in the floor.  And if there are large cracks you will need to use some concrete patching compound to fix them.  Luckily I only had some hairline cracks, so no big deal.  But the concrete was uneven in a few areas so that needed to be leveled out. The self-leveling compound comes in a powder form and you add water and mix with a power mixer until the consistency is syrupy.  Then pour it on and it will flow to fill in the low spots.  You can see below I have poured the compound down.  You can use a trowel to smooth out the compound even more, but you have to work fairly quickly because this stuff dries fast.