How not to install tile

Our newly-tiled shower

When we purchased this house last year, we found lots of interesting hidden details.

Let's revisit the memory of when we scrubbed the shower for the first time, shall we?

The tiles literally popped out and disappeared into the wall space one by one, leaving behind black holes in their wake.  

We were left with a row of gaping holes in the middle of our shower.

Evidently the previous builder didn't believe in doing a job correctly.

The tile was mounted on just dry wall.

And evidently the previous owners didn't believe in using caulk.

Of COURSE it rotted away.

(Unfortunately I couldn't find any old pictures of our nasty shower to share. Just imagine it the most horrible, moldy drywall you can, mkay?)

So we learned how to rebuild walls and install tile this year.

Let me rephrase that.

We learned how NOT to install tile this year.

We learned all the wrong ways to do the job, through classic trial-and-error.

Let me explain.

We thought we had a brilliant plan. 

We purchased assorted surplus tile in an attempt to save money.

All the tile cost us only $20 instead of hundreds. 

I was going for a mosaic kind of look with several shades of natural-looking tile.

In my head it look so great.

But then our problems began.

Inexperienced DIY-er that I was, I didn't realize tile isn't true to its measurements.

You can buy 6 inch tiles, but it's not TRULY 6 inches square.

This meant all of our mismatched tile were slightly different sizes and slightly different widths. 

Which made tiling the shower a nightmare. Or a comedy, depending how you look at it.

We spent hundreds of hours shaving off edges of tile to make them fit.

Ug.

It would have been way better to just buy new tile that all matched.

We COULD have done the tiling all in one weekend if we had matching tile, but no, that's not the way it worked for us.

Our desire to save some money cost us in big time in labor later.

SO- did I tell you it took us months to do this job? (Closer to a  year would be more accurate.)

We'd work on it for hours and get only a couple rows of tile installed. 

So then we'd give up for a couple weeks and work on other, more rewarding, projects someplace else in the house.

In the meantime, my bedroom floor was full of tiles and tools. 

It looked pretty awful, even when the tiles were stacked neatly in rows.

We had to force ourselves to work on this beastly project. 

After months and months of work, we finally finished!

YAY! (insert exuberant happy dance right here)

I can't tell you how spoiled I feel having a usable shower in the master bathroom.

I feel like a queen, isn't that funny?