Tile tales

What is the most important thing about building a (small) bathroom in a new house? Selecting the tile? Nope. Choosing a shower door? Nah. Picking up a shower trim? Not even close. The most important thing about building a (small) bathroom is making sure that the walls are straight. Because if they are not, you will be in a lot of trouble.

Most of my efforts related to the bathroom work went into picking stuff: cabinet, sink, faucet, lighting, tile, shower door, shower trim. When the tile installer came, everything was ready, but I was still not sure about a couple of things. I did not know what to use for the sink backsplash. I picked one thing, then another, and when the latter was installed, I did not like how it looked, so had to ask my contractor to redo it which required the tile guy to come back. Not my proudest moment.

Didn't like this backsplash.

Then I made a mistake of choosing mosaic tile as the back wall of the shower shelves. Once they were installed, my wife and daughter did not like them (and they were right: mosaic tile looked cheap and out of place). It was too late to remove it, so I asked the tile guy to install the regular tile over the mosaic tile (which he did).

After all things were done, I took a glance, and all seemed good. Then the tile guy left. Then I stopped by the bathroom to take another look and I realized that the tile edge on the right side was V-shaped. I measured it and found out that the edge at the top was half inch wider than at the bottom. Which does not sound like much of a deal and would probably not be noticeable if the tile edge were, say, a few inches wide. But it started at about 1/8" at the bottom and expanded to about 1" at the top and I could see that. And I did not like it.

How did this happen? Apparently, when the roof trusses were installed (by hand), the wall shifted a bit. Which is not a big deal. It happens often. The walls in my current house are all crooked, but I haven't realized it before the guy who installed my kitchen tile pointed this out to me. And here it would not be a problem had it not been the bathroom. Or, if we used smaller tiles, there was a chance it could have been corrected, but we used 24"x48" tile which made fixing it by evening out tile impossible.

I am not sure why nobody pointed this out to me. Except, maybe the tile guy did. He said something about the job taking longer than expected because of the edge tile, but I assumed he just meant the difficulty of installing the narrow pieces. Nevertheless, the tile was done and I was not happy. When I told my contractor I wanted it fixed, he was not happy. He talked to the tile guy and the tile guy was not happy. Nobody was happy.

It took a few weeks trying to find out the best option to correct the problem, but we could not find anyone who would be willing to take a small job like that, so eventually my contractor fixed it himself. He did a good job, so now it looks exactly how it's supposed to look.

Sink backsplash replaced.

Lesson learned: When you build a house, make sure your walls (in important places, like bathroom and kitchen) are straight and there is an equal distance between the walls at the ceiling level and by the floor. If you notice a problem, get it corrected before the drywall gets installed. If you miss it at this stage, with every new stage (drywall installed, tile installed) it will be more and more difficult to correct. Or if you are not an obsessive-compulsive type, maybe you wouldn't even care.

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