More Tiling

We've been doing a back-and-forth with our neighbors Jeff and Courtney's tile saw because they just happen to be tiling their bathroom too. It's a bit inconvenient though, lugging it to and fro, so when Jeff tells me on Thursday afternoon that I can have the tile saw until Saturday morning, I snatched up that opportunity and never looked back.
The previous weekend, I'd bought at home depot ~52 sqft of subway tile, 15 linear ft of bullnose subway tiles, and a corner shelf, so I was all set to go with my leftover laticrete 317 thinset from the floor tile episode.

So I mixed up my thinset again

and started tiling from the floor; I've read that you're supposed to tile from the middle of the back wall, in a cross shape (one horizontal line of tile across the middle, one vertical line of tile down the middle) but I just didn't want to have to deal with shlumping tile so I did what I thought made the most sense. The Home Depot subway tile is self-spacing, which is THE BEST - super easy and looks perfect. After tiling the bathroom floor with non-self-spacing 12x12 tiles, I can say with a little tiny bit of authority that self-spacers are a shower-saver.
 

I started on a side wall (gasp)

I smear just enough thinset for one row at a time and trowel it down. sidenote: since my shower floor is sloped, the first row is completely uneven, which made it by far the most time consuming part of the whole shower

I found that "back buttering" (spreading thinset on the back of tile, heavily recommended) in addition to the thinset on the wall was critical for proper tile adhesion

 I worked til 1:30am on Thursday night, which is when I ran out of thinset. Boo.

end of day 1

Started up again late morning on Friday after a quick run to the tile store for more thinset. More of the same, except this time I was up til 3am, at which point I ran out of tile. BOO.

end of day 2. I was short 10 tiles for the pony wall. ARGH!

this accent tile was picked out MONTHS ago. The dark gray squares are a porcelain tile I picked up at the Vermont Salvage for 4$ total (!!) and I needed 2sqft of the 1x2 rectangular glass (27$/sqft) and 1sqft of the 5/8x5/8 square mosaic glass (28$/sqft)

Jeff called on Saturday morning saying he wouldn't need the tile saw until Sunday (hauled ass for nothing). So we ran to Home Depot again for 2sqft of subway tile (i.e. 16 tiles) and I planned on finishing that night. Obviously staying up til 3am the previous night would take it's toll, though, and I was out of commission the rest of that day (sorry, Dan). Luckily, Jeff called again on Saturday night saying he wouldn't need the tile saw til Monday evening, so I finished most of the tiling this afternoon.

Waddaya think?

my corner shelf! sidenote #2: Dan for some reason hates that overhead light. He says it looks like a prison light and groans when I point out similar looking lights I find at Price Chopper (grocery store) and The Cave (a grungy pizza place). I think it completely fits the bill because 1) it's nautical and 2) it was cheap (46$ I think?)!

I still don't know what to do with the ledges. They say you really should get one solid piece of stone for shower ledges and thresholds - because water would get channeled into the grout lines, which is not really good for them - but they are mucho expensivo $$. If I just use leftover pieces of slate, which you can see layed out in the above pictures, it's basically free at this point, since I have no other use for the leftover pieces anyway. If I get solid pieces of granite or something they'll probably run ~70$ for each piece. Yikes. I'll make a decision by the time I get to tiling that floor  - my pebbles are en route and should be here in a week or so! I'm leaning towards leftover slate though.