One-Two-Three-Floor!
The Rolling Stones must have been talking about home remodeling when they sang “You can’t always get what you want, and if you try sometime you find you get what you need.”
I wanted hardwood floors in our master bathroom. Circumstances, a.k.a “The Floor Guys,” prevented that from happening. So now I have tiled floors. If I briefly swap my ‘Wants and Wishes’ hat for a ‘Honey, Let’s be Practical’ hat, I can see that tiled floors are what we need. As much as I hate to admit it.
Here’s what the floor originally looked like:
That’s a hardwood floor made with 95 year-old, 3-1/4″ thick fir planks. We had hoped to refinish the floors, because they can look like this:
And that’s beautiful. Although it IS possible to have hardwood floors in a bathroom if you’re careful with them, you can’t do it unless you have just the right “floor” set up (subfloor and vapor barrier under the hardwood planks). And we do not. So…
On Friday night, we covered those floors with waterproof backerboard. It was a little painful to do it. We cemented the backerboard to the wood floor with Versabond and screwed it down with 1-1/4″ cement board screws every 6 inches. 
I mean, that’s just as nice as a hardwood floor, right?
After the backboard dried overnight, Joey and my father-in-law began tiling on Saturday morning***. They applied 12 X 12 tiles (Roman Stone, Roman Noce porcelain tiles from Lowes) to the backboard with mortar (Ultra Flex 2) and 1/8″ spacers.
Then we grouted (Spectra Lock) on Sunday morning after the tiles had set. Here’s the finished project:
It turned out pretty well and was so much easier than tiling the shower. Using large tiles really cuts down on the work.
So, 13 hours of work later, we have a tiled master bathroom floor. I’m sure someday I will grow to love it. Right now I’m still mildly bitter that my potentially beautiful hardwood bathroom floors are now buried under cement and mortar. But with positive thinking and little effort, I’ll get over it.
Of course, I wore the same jeans from start to finish of the project. Here’s what they looked like when we were done:
Not too bad. And surprisingly, those kneepads are not a fashion statement. They’re a ‘must have’ item when it comes to floor tiling.
***Side note: Just 6 tiles shy of finishing the project, Joey yelled down to me that we were out of tiles. The nearest Lowes is 45 minutes away (I live in the country). So my darling mom and dad, who were out for a joyride on their BMW motorcycle, rode to the ‘city,’ strapped a 50-pound box of tile to their bike, and delivered it to our door. It’s moments like this when I realize our remodel is a group effort, and there’s no way Joey and I would’ve made it this far without help from our family and friends.
Be sure to seal the grout. That’ll help keep your floors looking as good as they are now. I wrote a post about Miracle cleaning and sealing
While it may not be what you wanted, that floor looks great! Congratulations.
And aren’t you lucky to have such cool parents to strap tile to their Harley? I love it!
I feel the need to comment on the jeans. I discovered while working in a hydraulics shop that my Levi 501s didn’t hold up very well in an industrial, oil-filled setting. I had 3 pair that started that job with me, and one pair lasted the whole time. Those were dyed black. The other two essentially disintegrated under the onslaught of hydraulic fluid. The black pair, however, soldiered on, with nary a holed knee, nor a torn button hole. Something about the black dye makes them nearly indestructable.