Peel & stick vinyl on the fireplace

The wife is out of town and the kids spent last night at gramma and grampa’s, so to stave off the quiet of a baseball-less evening I spent last night putting some tile on the fireplace. 

I liked that there was still light when I started on this.

Do vinyl times need to acclimate to their environment? I don’t think so. But these have been in the house since my Columbus Day off anyway so I assumed they would be fine. And the first one went up no problem. The first one, at least.

Okay, I can imagine this looking okay.

With some grid lines down I stuck some tiles on as a test and went upstairs to get a drink, only to hear a crashing sound while I was pouring something brown. Ooops. I had been using a grout float to put the tiles on firmly but that didn’t seem to be doing the trick. But a few dabs of additional glue, along with some thumb tacks to make sure they maintained surface connection, and they seem to be staying on the wall fine. I have read that this can degrade the adhesive already on, but some thumbtacks holding tiles in place after gluing seems to be giving it enough surface contact to form a strong enough bond. Fingers crossed. 

The point of no return.

Using larger tiles meant it was time to start cutting to fit remaining spaces pretty quickly, but it turned out that wasn’t so bad. These tiles scored and broke clean and easy! There was a lot of cutting though, and pretty soon I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t have gone with more of an asymmetrical pattern. I did say “get some tile on the fireplace” though, so I wasn’t planning on finishing it in one night. 

Not finished but completely covered.

Planning or not though, that’s what happened. Maybe it was my delicious dinner (more on that later), or maybe it was the beers that kept finding their way downstairs, but once I got down to the bottom half I wasn’t stopping before everything was tiled. I don’t think the drinking hurt my spacing; all in all I don’t think it looks half bad. 

Unfortunately that means now I have to grout. I hate grout.