Weekend Tiling Firewall

August 27, 2023. There was lots of progress on our tiling project this weekend, which is good, ideally we will finish before the open house next weekend. I had already posted about the hexagon tiles in the kitchen. Those are finished, minus the grout.

This weekend’s goal is tiling the firewall for the wood burning stove. The white surfaces are heat-resistant boards that will be tiled. On Saturday, I tiled the tall thin section between the brown post and the white board.

On Sunday, Kayo joined me, and we started tiling the wall. At this point, we have put one column of wall tiles on. There is a black trim strip to hide the edges of the tile at the corner.

Kayo is back-buttering tiles —- our notched trowel does not quite apply the recommended about of thin set, and this technique is recommended anyway for large wall tiles. It worked well for Kayo to handle applying the thin set adhesive (letting her gloves get dirty) while I applied the tiles to the wall and aligned them (using clean hands). It is particularly difficult to clean the thin set from these tiles, because they are fairly rough, but a good point is that it is hard to see the thin set stains on the tile surface.

The black metal trim is held in place by thin set, so it made more sense to work one column at a time, rather than rows at a time. You should lay the tiles in 30-60 minutes before the thin set gets too dry. We were running low on thin set towards the end, so there is not as much here. Hopefully it holds!

Mission accomplished! It took us most of the day, but we finished by working together. Our romantic date was installing tiles, which included McDonald’s for lunch.