Score One For The Tiles

Now I'm getting close to the end of the tiling. I realize I keep saying it, but it's true. For the last couple of weeks I've only put in a few hours here and there which has slowed progress. If only I didn't have to work at my stoopid job I could finish this one. Sigh.

At any rate.

I'm laying the rows of tile that go up to the wall. I want to leave a scramus width of space between the tile and the brick to allow for contraction and expansion of the two different substances, and I also need to allow for another scramus width between the last full row of tiles and the ones that will be cut.

Make sense?

So I took a full tile, and stuck two scramuses on the end to use as a marker tile. You can see my half-brained way of doing this. I used cyanoacrylate (aka "CA" aka "Super Glue") to glue two scramuses together to make one Super Scramus, then I taped them to the edge of the tile.

I'll butt (hee hee hee! I wrote 'butt'!) the scramus end up against the wall when I measure for the cut tile.

None of this may make sense - it's a bit hard to describe, but hopefully it will be clear as we go along.

Or something like that.

We take one full tile, and lay it on top of the last full tile on the row nearest the wall. We square it up carefully.

This tile will be the one we cut to fit between the full tile row and the wall.

Then we lay the marker tile, butted (!) against the wall on the scramus side, and we take a pencil and make a line on the full tile we just put down.

You may be saying to me "why are you using a pencil to do this? I thought you liked those China marker pencil type things.

The answer, Gntl Rdr, is that I do like dem China markers, but they are not fine enough to make this mark. We need to be fairly precise here so we'll get a nice fit.

It shall become clear momentarily.

I hope.

Now comes the fun part. I was planning to do these cuts near the wall with my wet saw, but I happened to have recently gotten this way cool book on tiling at Strosniders. I know what you're thinking...why didn't choo get ze book FIRST? (You can, after all, tell I ain't no expert at this). The answer is, I pretty much knew what to do, but I got the book for inspiration for MORE projects. As if this wasn't enough.

Anyway.

The book suggests using a snap tile cutter to do these cuts, so I went and got one. And, whoo boy, am I glad I spent $17.95 for this. It may be the best $17.95 I ever did spend. This thing rocks.

Whatcha do is put the tile in the cutter, line up your mark, and score it with the blade. The blade is a smallish round blade - think of a 1/2" round pizza cutter and you have the mental image.

After you score the tile, you press the handle of the cutter down and it puts enough pressure on the tile to make it break in half perfectly.

Then, we take our newly cut piece and lay it where we want. Lookit that! You see why I allowed for two scramus widths. There is one between the existing tile and one between the tile and brick (can't see it here but it is there).

It looks purty perfessionul!

Now to do 30 more tiles like this....