Tiling can make your bathroom or kitchen look beautiful. But if your tile has an odd layout you’ll kick yourself even when others won’t notice.
The video below is of a bathroom in an office building I visited. It’s a single door entry and you’ll see that the right side of the room has a 2 inch tile end piece while the wall directly opposite has a 1/2 inch tile end piece. Standard 6 inch tiles were used for this floor installation, and the person setting them could have saved a lot of tile cutting by just measuring the floor dimensions.
The first step in tiling this simple rectangular room would be to start the layout with a full tile in the center of the doorway. This would leave any cut tiles at the opposite end of the room directly across from the door. Begin this process by snapping your first chalkline across the doorway, ensuring the line is midway underneath the closed door. This will make sure the tile transition is hidden under the door and not exposed in the bathroom or adjacent room.
The second step is to measure the door jamb distance, mark the half way point, and snap a second chalkline perpendicular to the one you snapped in step one. At this point, take a few tiles you’ll be using for the project and lay them out along the edge of the second chalkline until you get to the wall directly across from the door.
When you lay down the last full tile make a mark on the floor at it’s edge closest to the wall and then snap a third chalkline. The third chalkline will be parallel to the mark you made on the floor and perpendicular to the second chalkline.
This next procedure is the one that will prevent your room from having uneven small tiles at both end walls. Layout several tiles along the third chalkline in order to determine the size of both tiles that cap the ends of the row. To avoid having one cut tile that is a tiny sliver (like in the first video above) you can shift the tiles to either the right or the left by snapping a fourth chalkline parallel to the third chalkline. Keep in mind that shifting the tiles will affect how the full tiles look in the doorway. The video below explains how to perform this important step and provides a nifty tip on how to maintain your chalklines.
The person who installed the tiles in the first video should have shifted all the tiles to the left. This would have eliminated the 1/2 inch tile and made the tile on the right end of the row 1/2 inch bigger. Plus, the newly created 2.5 inch tile on the right side of the room would have been less noticeable in this case since the door opens to the right.
I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial on laying tile in a bathroom. Anyone can do a tiling project the correct way by gaining knowledge and confidence. It’s my goal to encourage you to take that first step toward realizing your dream floor.
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