You Can Lay Your Own Ceramic Tile

Last year, my Beagle puppy tore up a big hole in the linoleum that covers our kitchen and dining room. She was in her digging phase and must've found a soft spot on the floor. We tolerated it for a while as the hole kept growing bigger, but eventually got sick of it. That to the economic stimulus check, we decided to use the money to replace all our linoleum with ceramic tile. To save money, my wife and I decided to do the work ourselves. By 'ourselves', that really means just me.

The first thing you need to do is prep the floor. This is actually the hardest part of the job. You need to remove all the shoe molding from the walls, then pull up the linoleum. After you do that, you need to scrape up the paper and glue left behind. It took me a total of about 10 hours to scrape up all that stuff, and only for about a 250 square foot area.

To do the scraping, I highly recommend you get a floor scraper (see photo) from Lowes. It's like a giant chisel with a blade attached and it works better than anything else I tried. I say that because I tried several different things until a friend who actually installs flooring for a living showed me his scraper. It'll cost you about 18 bucks and you need to buy a $4 pack of replacement blades, but it is sooooo worth it. The blade also helps you pry up shoe molding.

Once the scraping is done and the floor is clean, you get to lay the tile. The hardest part of laying tile is getting started because you want to lay the tile in such a way as to minimize cutting. You need to pop a chalk line to make sure you got things lined up. Also know that your walls and counters are not always perfectly straight. Mine sure as hell weren't.

With a trowel, you put down the mortar and make sure not to let too much of it build up between the tiles. You should get a couple bags of plastic spacers to make the job much easier. Just make sure you put the spacers close to the corners to help keep things even. The mortar sets very quickly, so you should do them one row at a time and constantly check to make sure everything is lined up. You aren't supposed to walk on the tile for at least 24 hours.

If you have to cut the tile, which you most certainly will, you can actually take them to Lowes (if you bought the tile there) and they will cut for you. If it's just a few pieces, they'll do it right there. Otherwise, you'll have to drop it off and come back later. I think this is awesome. If you are doing a big job, you can rent a wet saw or find someone who has one and borrow it.

My total cost of materials and tile was less than $800 to do @ 250 square feet of flooring. If I had paid somebody to do it, my bill would have been at least twice that. Sure, I could have saved myself a lot of sweat and hard work to pay somebody, but where is the fun in that?

As always, it helps to have someone with some tile laying experience to help you get started. Once you get the first few tiles laid, it really is a breeze. Be sure to wear kneepads or you'll regret it later.