Welcome to the second installment of DIY (Do It Yourself) or DDIY (Don’t Do It Yourself) with expert house flipper Stu Burk! Today he has some tips on installing tile.
First and foremost is we’re gonna look down here at the floor. You’ll see I’ve got what’s called a quarter inch grout line. That makes it a little more forgiving for you, as far as you wanna keep a straight line, but it’s kinda tough sometimes. The thinner the line, the more tight and the more straight you gotta make it. You gotta little bit of give and take with a quarter inch grout line, so that’s a big plus, especially on the floor. It also gives you more color to look at in the tile beside the tile itself. In addition, you see down in here I have some of it that I haven’t finished yet.
Over here where the adhesive, or what’s called mortar, and that’s what holds, obviously, the tiles to the floor, you gotta make sure that those grooves are open so you can put the grout in there. Without that, you’re gonna have a problem. The second part of that is once that’s dried, you can take what kind of looks like a little toothbrush, and you can rub out the grout, or I’m sorry, the mortar, down in here, and be able to still put in your grout. That’s the easy part. The mortar adhesive comes off really easy with water, even two, three, four days, a week later, but the grout’s another story. When you’re laying this out, you have to make sure and wipe it down three, four, five, six times. You’ll see it on another Yelp or YouTube videos or something else, you gotta be using a sponge and a lot of water, and clean water.
And here’s my biggest tip after everything that I just said: do not ever, ever pour the old water down a sink. There’s sand in it most of the times. Guess what? I’ve paid $200 to have a drain unclogged. Didn’t really like that too much. So once you dump that water out, dump it outside, never dump it down the drain.
This is Stu with another episode of “DIY or DDIY,” and I think this is a DIY if you wanna give it a shot.
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