Leveling & Dry Fitting Tile In An Outdoor Area

Since we last checked in on the sunroom last Thursday, Sherry and I have managed to check four more things off the list: installing two ceiling fans, cleaning the concrete floor, leveling it, and cutting the tile and planning out our pattern (aka: dry fitting). But excuse me while I backburner the fan installation walkthrough (I promise it’ll pop up in a few days) because we are simply too psyched to share those three tiling prep steps with you folks. We made some serious weekend progress – more than we thought we would – and we could not be more excited about the tile pattern that we landed on. In fact, I am likely outside tiling as you read this… so hopefully within a week it’ll all be fully installed and grouted and ready for the big reveal!

So let us talk about how we got this tile train moving (and if you did not realize you boarded the tile train, you can check out this post for why we are headed to that destination). Our trio of prep tasks were to: remove a lingering smell, level the ground since this is now open to the elements and we did not want water pooling in certain places, and determine our tile pattern (border? no border? running brick pattern? modern grid?). Let us start with deep cleaning the concrete to eliminate the odors it was holding onto – because, as you may recall, this room was once covered in a wall to wall carpeting that got wet over time due to broken doors and wood rot, so it was certainly something we needed to attend to.

In our post about removing the old carpet a bunch of you in fact recommended using this product (MisterMax Anti-Icky-Poo) which many of you described as having a hilarious name but also being the best thing you’ve ever tried on deeply penetrating odors. Even though we’d be tiling over the cement, we hoped to make sure every time it got hot outside there was not any old whiff of something that wafted up from the cement floors). Most of the more obvious smells had thankfully vanished once we took out all of the glass doors to permanently air things out, but since we’d already picked up the bottle based on your recommends, we figured it could not hurt to scrub some on simply to be sure nothing would re-emerge on a muggy day. It is truly straightforward to apply (scrub on with a brush + let dry = smell’s gone).

The other issue we needed to solve before tiling was taking care of some not-so-level spots. With the glass doors took out, the space does collect a bit of moisture when it rains. For the most part it dries off swiftly, but small puddles do form in a couple of low spots – most of which seem to be closer to the house (in spots where we will likely have furniture). And furniture sitting in little puddles after every heavy rain = not so strong.

So we chose to give self-leveling concrete a try. It sounded scary (and messy) to us at first, but after watching a few videos online it in fact did not seem so bad. We got all of our supplies at The Tile Shop which, in addition to the concrete mix itself, included a primer they recommended to assist the new cement bond to the existing surface. Unlike a paint primer, it was a truly watery substance that I could brush on especially fast.

One bag of self-leveling concrete was supposed to cover 15 sq. ft. and I was not planning to do the whole sunroom floor (since I simply hoped to fill in some low spots and, if anything, create a quite slight slope away from the house). So I ended up getting five bags – but only using four of them. I also got two buckets so I could mix two batches at once, but only used one because the 5-gallon Home Depot bucket ended up not being big sufficient. So if you are attempting this at home, go straight for a 6-galloner (the Tile Shop one fit the bill).

Speaking of buckets, I also picked up this “measuring bucket” that is designed to measure out the ideal amount of water for one bag of concrete (if you fill it too high the water drains out of the hole and then you are all set). I felt a little silly for paying $2 for a bucket with a hole in it, but it ended up being worth the peace of mind that I got from not having to worry that I made my mix too soupy or not soupy sufficient.

After pouring the water in my 6-gallon mixing bucket, I brought in a bit of the cement powder at a time – mixing it truly well before adding more, until the bag was empty. You in short have to mix this stuff with a paddle-mixer (i.e. giant whisk attached to a drill) so I was glad to have already purchased one for my upcoming tiling job.

This stuff is in fact truly watery. You picture cement being kinda like a thick cake batter consistency, but this was more like sunscreen that is been sitting out in the heat. But it is that liquid-y property that in fact helps it level things off mostly on its own.

It does not do all of the work for you, but it certainly works with you as you go. I used a broom to push some of my puddles together and into corners. But it was not hard or meticulous work by any means. Wherever I swept, the liquid simply magically reformed into a level, flat surface. It is nearly like that liquid that Alex Mack or those kids from those old Capri Sun commercials would turn into, simply less silvery.

I ended up using four bags in total and you can see how the area closest to the window was already starting to harden by the time my last batch (to the left of it) went on.

But it was not until the next morning that it was fully solid and ready to walk skip on.

With that out of the way, we could at last start placing tile. Well, start planning to place tile. Sherry and I were 99% sure we hoped to do a brick-layer pattern with our 20″ x 20″ square tiles. But we were not quite sure where we hoped to start the pattern and whether or not we hoped some sort of a border. So we broke open a box or two and began playing around.

The first thing that the exercise confirmed is that we needed to cut out the bottoms of our door jambs. We did this for our wood floors inside too. It in short lets the flooring slide under the trim, saving you from having to intricately cut your tile around it and ultimately gives you a cleaner look. To determine the height I set my flat saw (aka Dremel Multimax) against a tile and a piece of cardboard (to protect the tile from the saw and to adjust for thinset height).

See? You end up with a much cleaner edge once that chunk of trim is gone. And once the thinset raises the tile a smidge more it should be a pleasant tight fit (which we will then seal with clear exterior caulk to protect the wood from any moisture/rot).

The other thing this exercise confirmed for us is that we certainly want a border. It not only helps to define the edge more crisply (and ended up looking a lot more high end to us) we realized it would also make the tiling job a lot easier when it came to cutting tiles around the posts (instead of notching things out, I could make the border the same width as the posts and simply lay them down to create that outside edge which squared off everything so that interior rectangle of tiles would require fewer cuts). So after a lot of moving and cutting and shifting and more cutting, this is the final pattern that we came up with:

I had to create the border pieces myself by cutting the square tiles on the wet saw. But luckily I was able to get three border pieces out of one tile, so we did not have to sacrifice too much scrap to this cause!

It was not the most lively task to slice up eight tiles this way (to make 24 border tiles to complete the perimeter) but we think it was a large improvement over the unbordered look. It defines the edge nicely (which is helpful because there is a slight step up from the deck into the sunroom) and, by doing all of these cuts during my prep stage, it’ll hopefully make my day(s) of tile-laying go a lot faster. Oh yeah, and forgive the hazy water mark from the hose in the shot below, it wiped right off.

But before I leave the topic of edges, one thing we were concerned about was how the exposed edge of the tiles would look from the deck (and if it would get beat-up over time). So we picked up these metal edging pieces (that can be easily cut to size with some metal snips) to give our edges a wrapped up look. I realize they look quite in-your-face in this photo below (they are more of a matte charcoal tone, but for some reason they look shiny and black below) but if you look at the photo above you can see it in fact blends fairly nicely with the tile to create a thin charcoal rule around the border that looks clean and wrapped up (without exposing the chalky cut edge of the tile).

My goal is to get all of the tile set by the end of the day tomorrow and then it simply needs to be grouted and clean up for us to share those big before and after pics with you folks – hopefully by the beginning of next week. And fan enthusiasts – fret not. I will be back with a fairly detailed post about how we installed them (turns out they were not as bad as we feared). What did you folks do this weekend?