Am I a Tiling Expert yet?

Got the tile saw back again! This time for the master bath shower!

So the master bathroom shower design is much more complicated than the shared bath shower design (remember self-spacing subway tile? Yeah, the BOMB.) and it's supposed to be super luxe with ~*marble*~ tile. I had big dreams of using calacatta marble, but it's like, 20$/sqft even at warehouse merchant prices, and I wanted to use mosaic anyway (in which case the beautiful calacatta veining would get somewhat obscured). So I set my heart on Carrara herringbone mosaic as my starting point and went from there. I wanted to do a border detail with the herringbone inside and when I saw the paradise beige marble tile at Home Depot (4.77$/sqft), I think I may have been struck by a pot of gold (Dan edit: what's that phrase?), or maybe even by a stroke of genius. Beige tile with Carrara? How pretty would that look?! Dan the skeptic chose to rear his pretty head at that moment...

So I ordered a bunch of tile from Oracle Tile based in Anaheim, CA and let me just say how awesome they were and super prompt with their responses (emailing me photos of the exact tile I was going to get) and their delivery (free). I was in contact with thebuilderdepot too, but they were going to charge me 100$+ for delivery (despite their free shipping promotion for 50+sqft of a specific tile I wanted, except I only wanted ~30sqft of it, but my total order was 50sqft...am I being clear here? It felt pretty good when the manager called back and I told them I was buying my tile elsewhere, hehehe). Anyway, Oracle was awesome and continue to be awesome - we'll get to that.

About a week after I ordered the tile, it arrived in 8 heavy boxes: 32 sqft of herringbone mosaic, 8 sqft of 5/8 x 5/8 mosaic and 10 sqft of 1" hex mosaic (see? 50 total sqft). I started with the HD paradise beige tile, by cutting it in half into 6"x12" rectangles, then when the shipment arrived, I started lining the beige tile with 2 rows of the 5/8 tile:

End of day 2

my walkway. must. not. ruin. new. hardwood.

So far so good. Skeptic Dan was starting to come around...
I started the herringbone after that, which was hard! Non self-spacing tile tends to schlump and despite the herringbone being in 12"x12" sheets, each side of the sheet needs to be in line with all the sheets around it or it looks terrible! Another difficulty was that the back wall was just a smidgen wider than three 12" tiles (+one 6" tile) so I improvised with one row of 5/8 tile on the top and bottom - it looks planned, right?

End of day 3. Progress is slow, yo. I'd actually started on the back wall first, but did such a crappy job with it, I took it all down and started on the side wall instead. You can see where I scraped all the mortar off.

Day 4. Finish the side wall, re-start back wall

end of day 4

 Day 4 was also the day Dan started building our new grill (comes with strong recommendation from my father-in-law Peter and a home depot associate). We're like, bona fide homeowners now.

That chaos to the right is the shipping remains of the tile. I'm kinda a mess when I'm working. Gotta work on that.

done! We feasted on some delicious steaks that night.

I think the next day I took a break because it was my birthday! Tiling is surprisingly exhausting too, so after 3 straight days of it, I very much needed a break to rest my newly 28-year-old bones and let my hair recover from tile-spaghetti-hair-syndrome (from the dust). 

The next two days, I finished the back wall and did the hex floor...or at least what I could do of it. sigh. Still-novice tiler that I am, I didn't order enough tile. They say you ought to order an additional 10% of what you think you need; not only did I completely forget to order the extra 10%, I calculated what I needed by measuring it out in inches and converting to square feet, which is going to lead to a significant underestimation since the sheets are big and don't fit neatly into nooks and crannies.

end of day 5. Looks done, but not enough herringbone for pony wall. 6 sqft short.

end of day 6. ~*mood lighting*~. just kidding - the flash was whiting out the hex 

floor. 

argh.

I called back Oracle tile and they agreed to ship what I was missing (6 sqft herringbone & 1 sqft hex mosaic) with free shipping! How awesome is that?! (they normally charge shipping for orders less than 10sqft). All because I'm a complete dufus, too. 

So am I an expert tiler yet? This experience says, sadly no, not yet. 

leaning tower of tile boxes