The Floors are Tiled!

THE FARMHOUSE

We tiled our primary bathroom floors this week and oh my goodness, I love them! They’re absolutely stunning in all their honed marble goodness and I think they’re perfect for this space. Today I wanted to share some photos and show off all the other progress we (Garrett mostly) have made in here lately.

Incase you’ve lost track of where we left off (which would be perfectly understandable since it’s been awhile ; ), here’s our last post on this project.

Aren’t the tiles lovely?! They’re 2” honed marble hexagon tiles from the Tile Shop. This whole scene is getting me very excited. You dream and plan and work on a space for months (years even) but it still kinda surprises me when it starts to come together!

Here’s the perfectly-good, but not-very-functional-for-us place where we started…

It doesn’t look like a big change but it’s taken a lot of work to get this far! BTW we took the window molding off to make install of the wainscot easier, but they’ll be going back on, don’t worry! Okay, let’s get back to the tile…

We picked out these 2” honed marble hexagon beauties after debating over tiles for quite some time (you can see all the tiles we considered here). Ultimately these felt classic and right for the house plus they should compliment instead of taking away the real stars of the bathroom…the dark wood vanity and dark wood board and batten that’ll be going up on the walls. And BTW, after picking out the tiles, we approached The Tile Shop about a collaboration and received these gratis.

This was not our first time installing hexagon tiles but it was definitely the easiest! 9 years ago we used 1” hexagon tiles in our Bryant House bathroom. They were just the standard white hex mats sold at Home Depot (pretty sure they still sell them). Anyway, the floors weren’t prepped well. The space was tiny. And the hexagons didn’t seem to line up sheet to sheet. The whole install was a headache and the final result was…okay.

Learning from experience, Garrett spent a lot of time prepping the floors. We’re in an old house, so they’re never going to be perfect, but level floors are key to an easy and good-looking tile install! Garrett laid hardibacker over our original subfloors (which are in really good shape considering they’re 109 years old!).

We still have a little tile fill-in to do around the chimney and such. Somehow we tiled ourselves away from this area before we realized what small, intricate cuts were needed. I mostly just wanted to show you how pretty the honed Carrara marble looks with the chimney. It’s like grit meets polish! (BTW the space next to the wall that’s missing tiles will be under the vanity.)

Next up, we’ll seal and grout the tiles. After much research, Garrett is set on using Latricrete’s Spectralock Pro grout. It’s an epoxy, which should resist staining (helpful when you’re on hard well water). And I felt extra comfortable using it after talking to the guy at our local shop who said Spectralock is easier to install than most epoxies (which are notoriously difficult in general).

The only thing we’re still debating on as far as grout goes is which color to use. I want to use one grout for the floors and shower (which will be white subway) so was thinking bright white. But Laticrete’s bright white isn’t as bright as I anticipated. Maybe that’s okay. Or maybe we should go for a gray…? I think we’ve narrowed it down to bright white and silver shadow. Do you have a favorite?