Saturday started at 7.40 with a pencil line down the middle of the bathroom wall above the basin, which I checked with a spirit level, rubbed out, drew again and checked again. It was the least relaxing start to a weekend since the woodchip. "Measure twice, swear once," said Matt from the doorway, holding a mug and offering no other opinions.
This was my second go at tiling. The first was the kitchen splashback over the early May bank holiday weekend last year, white metro tiles, white grout, part of the £1,160 refresh. I started that one at the worktop and worked upwards by eye, and it shows: the rows run uphill by about 4 mm across a metre, because the worktop isn't level and I trusted it. The bathroom job was kept small on purpose, about 0.6 square metres behind the basin, 100 x 200 mm white tiles, in a room with a peach suite from about 1992. The paint behind the basin had gone grey in a line 15 cm above the rim and started to bubble, and I was tired of cleaning the same patch of wall.
Choosing and setting out
The tiles were £21 for a box covering a square metre. I stood in the tile aisle with a photo of the basin on my phone, held it up to every display and found that white was the only colour that didn't fight it. Peach, it turns out, goes with white if you don't look at it directly. Green was Matt's idea, for about nine seconds.
The centre line was the lesson from the kitchen. Setting out from the middle means the cut tiles at each end come out the same size, so the thing looks planned. The basin rim, I found with the level, is 4 mm lower on the left than the right, which years of sealant had been hiding. So the first row sits on a level batten screwed to the wall, and the gap above the rim runs from 3 mm to 7 mm and gets filled with sealant at the end. Nobody will see it unless they read this.
Tiling and cutting
I used ready-mixed flexible adhesive from a tub (£12.50), spread with a notched trowel about a third of a square metre at a time, and 3 mm spacers. The first row took forty minutes. The last took fifteen. Jas had handed over his tile cutter on Friday evening, plus a pair of nibblers, with the instruction "don't use the cutter for the curves". It was a bit like being lent a very small, very sharp dog.
Two pipes come out of the wall at the right-hand end of the basin and bend into the taps, so four tiles needed a notch or a hole. This is where I made the mistake. I measured the first pipe's position from the top of the tile instead of the bottom and ruined two tiles before Matt took the pencil off me. The box had spare, so it cost nothing but pride. I should also have laid the whole thing out dry on the bathroom floor first. I only did the bottom two rows, so the notches landed on awkward joints and I cut three tiles twice.
Grout and the argument
The tiles went up on Saturday between ten and one, 29 whole ones plus the cuts, and the adhesive wanted 24 hours, so the grouting was Sunday evening. Matt wanted white grout, "because it's a white tile". I wanted light grey. The kitchen was my evidence: fifteen months on, the white grout behind the kettle is the colour of a used teabag, and I said white around a basin would do the same within three months. Light grey won, 1 to 0, and Matt said "Fine," in the voice of a man keeping a note. It looks good. He has now said so twice, and neither time was it an admission.
The basin edge and the corner don't get grout at all. They get sealant, which flexes. I did them on Monday between masking tape lines and pulled the tape while the sealant was still wet. The whole job cost £52: tiles £21, adhesive £12.50, grout £8, spacers £2, a trowel and grout float £5.50 and sealant £3.
The basin is still peach. The wall behind it is white now. From the doorway they look like two people who've agreed not to talk about it.
