Things have been hectic in the Newman household. In the last few weeks, we had two weekends with the wet saw cutting tiles, Lisa heading down to Eugene and Florence, bits of electrical work for the kitchen, and lots of stuff at work to keep me busy.
The tile was a bit frustrating.
Things have been hectic in the Newman household. In the last few weeks, we had two weekends with the wet saw cutting tiles, Lisa heading down to Eugene and Florence, bits of electrical work for the kitchen, and lots of stuff at work to keep me busy.
The tile was a bit frustrating. I rented a wet saw from Home Depot with the hopes that we would be able to cut our floor tile to fit behind the stove. Unfortunately I had a very difficult time getting the saw to cut a square straight line. The saw had this propensity to deflect the blade the further the material went into the saw. I had plenty of advice from various sources about how to avoid this behavior, but none of it really worked. The deflection meant that the floor tiles were off by nearly an 8th of an inch at the end of the tile. This was compounded by having to cut two edges (or so I believed) from each tile. Here is the result of that effort…
It turns out that I didn’t really need to cut the top and the bottom. I mistook a line on the wall as the termination point for the tile. Since I had spent the better part of 3 hours cutting these four tiles, I wasn’t happy to find that out. In any regard, I cut the bottom “square” tiles for the backsplash and installed them. The plan was to cut up some floor tile from the same series as the medallion to make the border between the square tiles, and the tiles on point. Since the saw was misbehaving, this was difficult. I also found it very difficult to make notches in the tile for the outlets. I called Lisa in Eugene to discuss it with her. We came up with a plan to try out. I went to Oregon Tile and Marble and picked up tumbled marble mosaic tiles. This was a Saturday. When I got them home, I wasn’t all that pleased with the appearance (the red tiles didn’t match the medallion as well as the samples in the store), so I opted to wait. Unfortunately, none of the tile places open on Sunday in Portland carry the other option — a green polished mosaic tile.
I had to wait during the week to go to Oregon Tile and Marble. Lisa was in Florence at the time, so I was making decisions on my own. While at OTM, I was told that I could buy a product “Mira Matte” that would help make the marble darker. I bought that, and the green tile and went back to work. When I got home that evening I put some of the Mira Matte on a sample tile, and proceeded to put up a row of white tiles above the square tiles.
More later… 
Recent Comments