What to tile first?

cathie2029

12 years ago

Hello everyone. So we're getting ready to tile our bathroom and not sure what to do first. Do I tile the niches and the accent area on opposite wall (shower/diverter/handle/spout) OR the field tiles first and the niche/accent area afterwards?

I would think that if the niches/accent was tiled first then it would be easier to get the exact measurements for the field tiles.

Attached are the pictures or what we want the accent to look like/what we're going for- porcelain calacatta look 12x24 tile with white porcelain chair, pencil and mini subway as accents.

Thanks in advance.

This post was edited by kali2024 on Fri, Jan 17, 14 at 11:59

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Comments (3)

StoneTech
12 years ago
Tile and adust your field tiles for the best look. You can cut in the niches, etc as you get there.

By the way, the second pictures of the framing of the niches is atrocious! If you're using that trim, have them cut the trim on a "45" so that it looks like a human being did it....

(Yeah, I know it's just "laid out," dry....but, just sayin'.
raehelen
12 years ago
We are tiling our Master shower as I type... We tiled the back of the shower niche first. In our case, it was because the back was a decorative mosaic rock that needed to be sealed before doing the rest of the tiling. (I will probably cover that back with paper/masking tape anyways as DH is not the neatest tiler in the world). We then started with the other two walls of field tiles, and are now about to begin on the last wall where the niche is. Because it's going to be tricky cutting all those tiles to fit, I think DH has been putting off getting this done.

We adjusted the layout of the 12 X 24 field tiles so that a grout line falls right where the bottom shelf of the niche is.

How big/small are your niches? Have you ensured that you can fit your shampoo bottles in there?
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cathie2029
Original Author
12 years ago
StoneTech : ahahhaha ! I just put it out there to show that the inside is going to be the mini subway and outside will be the chair rail- yes of course the corners will be at 45- I wasn't sure if the set up was going to affect the order of tiling.

raehelen: the niches will be fairly large, 21.75 x 13 and 21.75 x 18. Our layout won't be perfect with the edges of the niches because I want the back wall to have half a tile at the top and half at the bottom, and of course that window couldn't be moved and I wanted the niches at a certain height- so basically we're doing this on the back wall (this is a spare bath).

Thanks to both of you. I thought doing the niches and the shower wall first would make sense, I just got nervous because I see a lot of guys doing them last on youtube so wasn't sure if there was a reason for it. Thank again.

This post was edited by kali2024 on Fri, Jan 17, 14 at 21:56