I still hate grout...

but it’s a lot more fun when your team won the World Series the night before. 

I wasn’t expecting to be grouting again so quickly, but now that I have I’m glad to say I’m done and wow, what an improvement from the cement slab hearth. Just about any kind of tile would look better than that though, but I’m very pleased with how this ended up looking.

Square enough at least.

One tricky part, spacing the top layer of tile square to the edges meant a gap between the flat top and the edges. I ended up squeezing some grout in with a bag to make sure the top tile stayed level as I filled it in, then cleaned it up. The corners went pretty much the same way. Thankfully, again, this wasn’t a big job surface-area wise, and doing it again so quickly after having grouted the wall tiles meant I had a routine that I thought was working well.

That's not bad.

There are actually quite a few finishes in the basement that still need caulking, and this fireplace adds to that list. But needing a line of caulk where the two types of tile meet isn’t stopping me from considering this project done. It feels like it took longer and shorter than two months; getting those wall tiles up felt like was taking forever but each stage of remodeling actually went relatively quickly. It just took from early Sept to early Nov to find enough free time to get each step done. Not a good sign for all the trim and tile on the caulking list, but the good news is winter break is right around the corner.

Nearly done.

Tiling a floating hearth

I was dubious about the weird dimensions of our hearth factoring into finding tiles that work, but it turns out a 7 inch depth and 5 inch height was actually just about perfect for 12” sections of mosaic tile. Which is good, b/c 6 of these cost almost twice what it cost to get 30 tiles to cover the rest of the fireplace and we went with one of the cheaper options. Jeez.

Shiny

Laying these out, I’m wondering if we’ve made a mistake getting glass tile to put on the hearth. I don’t think we’ll be using the fireplace much so these changes have been mostly cosmetic, but it occurs to me I still should have checked to see if these are fireplace appropriate. I’m relatively sure these will be fine though. 

Thank god, everything worked.

Anyway, without borders or bullnose my plan was to square each corner. Tile along the outside and then fit the top over the edges, and hope with grout things looked okay. Thankfully my test cuts were successful, and I was off to the races. Even with the kids downstairs with me this entire thing took less than an hour; only having to cut a straight edge a couple of times meant a pretty quick job.

Square enough for my tastes at least.

Things squared up pretty well, to the point where I don’t think there are any obvious errors that I will end up staring at every time I walk by, unlike the old backsplash (I chipped a tile right over the sink and didn’t notice until it was too late, and then that’s all I could see). Grout seems to have the ability to make those imperfections stand out though, so we’ll see after the next step. A few passes with a sanding sponge, a little grout, some caulk around the wall, and I think we can officially move the fireplace remodel into the “done” category.

Choosing tile

I had a moment of clarity over the weekend while out looking at tile with the family; the miniscule differences of my opinions on different tiles mean I basically don’t care what tile we ended up going with for the fireplace hearth. With that in mind we grabbed a few sheets and got ready to put them on. 

A quick aside, apparently you can’t go anywhere in the ‘burbs before Halloween without running into some kind of “safe trick or treating environment” where people hand candy out from the trunk of their car. We stopped by HD after a morning swim and there was one in the parking lot. Went to the grocery store afterwards to get milk, there was one there. Both full of kids in full costume. And it wasn’t like they turned our kids away b/c they were just in normal clothes, but how does everyone know about this kind of thing? We were just running errands, we didn’t expect this trip to end up taking almost three hours. And Halloween was still three days away. The kids have been riding a sugar high for days now.

Anyway, I was excited to go home and tile but it seems I had gotten a little ahead of myself. Apparently you can’t store a tile cutter in a detached garage over Chicago winters, b/c my 14” cutter from the condo backsplash refused to slide. And here I was congratulating past me for keeping this in it's original box for 3+ years just in case. Oh well. A few drops of lubrication and hopefully we’ll be cutting tiles soon. 

I guess we'll have to add wd-40 to our shopping list.

Yeah, that's not going to work for cutting tile.

Although getting this done means more grouting, so maybe I'll pretend it needs more time that it actually does. It's not like I'm going to find time to finish this during the week anyway.