Tile And Grout An Outdoor Area, step by step

Remember when we tiled the floor out back earlier this month? Oh yeah, we barely do either.

It has been such a drawn out process thanks to various battles with cold and rain that I cannot believe it is taken this long to at last get to this: a (mostly) wrapped up floor! Do not mind that light looking grout (it is in fact charcoal gray – but we will get to that in a minute).

We are truly glad with how it turned out – especially compared to the stained cement floor that we began with (you can read more about why we opted to tile rather than simply paint or stain the existing cement floor, and how we picked our tile here). But getting from then to now was certainly one of those Hands-on journeys with a few unexpected speed bumps, so throw on your most comfortable shoes, because we are gonna cover plenty of ground today. And it all ends in a budget & time breakdown for this whole project so far. Hooray numbers!

Let us rewind to October 4th, I think it was. I had simply wrapped up prepping the floor with some self-leveling concrete so I was at last ready to bust out our tiles and tiling supplies. In short mortar powder (brown bag) + liquid admixture (gray bottle) = thinset (aka the stuff that holds tiles in place). Since we were using large tiles, I mixed large batches at a time so a big bucket and paddle mixer were crucial.

I used my trowel to spread on a thin layer of thinset (which I like to be toothpaste-y in consistency). I did sufficient for about two tiles at a time, since I did not want to do too much and have it dry out before I could get the tile down.

Once it was spread smooth with the flat side of my trowel, I flipped the trowel over to the notched side and at a 45-degree angle I scraped grooves into the thinset. This helps to make sure your thinset is at an even depth before placing your tile. With big tiles you need a wider notch, so this a 1/2″ trowel. Oh and you can see the little x-like white spacers that we used between the tiles in this shot too. We went with 1/8th inch ones since the tile folks said those would work well with these tiles in an outdoor environment, and we tend to prefer small grout lines whenever possible.

I swiftly learned that one of the main challenges to installing tiles this large was keeping things level, since you want to avoid one tile from sitting higher or lower than the ones around it. And since we were doing a brick-layer pattern, it meant each tile was touching 6 other tiles. So trying to keep everything flush to everything else took some concentration and futzing. I “back buttered” whenever I needed to raise one corner slightly higher – in short applying some additional thinset to the back of the tile. Note: check out this post and this post for even more tiling info and additional pictures of other projects we have tackled.

This is what I accomplished on that first afternoon spent tiling. It was certainly taking me longer than I had hoped. Not simply because of the leveling-larger-tiles thing, but little tasks like mixing up batch after batch of thinset, lugging boxes of tile out from the garage, and making cuts here and there with the wet saw truly ate up the day. You certainly can go faster with two people, but seeing as the lady-wife was dealing with some fairly gnarly morning all-day sickness, I went it alone (as she wistfully peered out the window between bathroom breaks).

Thankfully, I was able to finish up the tile job the next day. It took me from about 9:30 – 6pm, but piece by piece and hour by hour that floor was coming together. And I was slowly mummifying my hands with thinset splatters.

In the end, we are truly glad with our slate-like porcelain tile choice. Even when it is wet it is not slick like the smooth concrete floor used to be, which was a major concern of ours, and we also like how it goes with the deck and how the tile border that we brought in truly elevates the look (more on how we planned that border here). My original hope was to grout a day or two after finishing things up out there, but Sunday was a wash because I could barely move (thanks to so much lifting, bending, hunching over the day before) and Monday was literally a wash because of rain. As was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of that week.

When things at last began to dry out on Monday, it revealed something that a week of rain had hidden: splotches of dried thinset all over the surface of the tile. Despite my best efforts to keep the surface of my tiles clean (I used a damp cloth to wipe off any drips or excess as I went) – it is a dirty job. Not helping matters was the natural texture of the tile (which is one of the things that makes them so gloriously non-slip) – it was apparently also strong at capturing bits of thinset AND the color of wet thinset simply happened to blend in with the color of the tile. So while I might have expected a bit of a haze on the tiles, these larger dots and smears were not apparent until the tiles dried out for a couple of days.

I was fairly frustrated, I will admit. The tiles that had looked so sparkly and new in the rain suddenly looked dirty and gross. But I found a pointer online about washing them with a 50/50 mixture of water and vinegar to get rid of that thinset residue.

That worked truly well for removing the haze on the tiles, but the actual spots of dry thinset took a bit more work. With some combination of chipping things with a screwdriver, rubbing with some cheesecloth (damp with vinegar), and scrubbing with a nylon brush, I was able to get the spots off. Well, that and a lot of elbow grease. If you find yourself in the same spot (ha, pun!) I certainly recommend testing any of these methods in an inconspicuous area before assuming it will not damage your particular tile. I was a bit worried about my screwdriver technique, but it worked out simply fine – although I doubt it would have on something glossier like marble.

But I do not want to downplay how tedious this unexpected cleaning task was (sometimes online Hands-on = look how plain this thirty step project was!). I think I spent a full morning and then some… and I still have some spots that I need to go back over. But on the bright side, my Cinderella impressions is fairly killer, no? I simply need some cartoon mice and a cranky stepsister or two.

But you can see how much things improved from this extra bit of effort (and it is certainly a kick in the pants to be more vigilant next time I tile).

Since that whole cleaning adventure was about two weeks ago, you’d think I could jump right into grouting… but since we had to wait for the tile to be fully dry, my cleaning shenanigans put us back to square one (the tile needs to be fully dry for three solid days in order for those cracks between them to dry out and be ready for grout). And then, by the time everything was dry again, we had entered a cold snap and the grout bag said not to apply it in temperatures under 50 degrees. Kinda felt like a cruel joke that Mother Nature was playing on me. Which is why as of Monday morning (as in October 27) it still looked like this. Groutless and alone.

But that was soon to come to an end. Yep, this quite week kicked off some serious grouting. Here is what we used:

1. Sanded grout (we chose a “charcoal” color which was inspired by liking the look of our dark thinset between the cracks)
2. Flexible Grout Admixture
3. Bucket for mixing grout
4. Trowel for mixing grout
5. Float for spreading grout
6. Sponges for wiping off excess grout
7. Bucket of water to keep sponges damp and clean
8. & 9. Towels and paper towels for helping to keep things (including me) clean

Thanks to the massive amounts of thinset this job took, it was not going to require much grout (since it was simply for the cracks). Which is why I only mixed up quite small batches at a time, so it did not dry out in the bucket before it could be spread. That is also why I used a plain trowel, not a paddle, to mix my grout. Note: Since we used 1/8″ spacers with our tile, we in fact could have used nonsanded grout for that sized gap, but the tile folks said sanded grout should add more durability since this is an outside area, so that is why we picked it.

I typically enjoy grouting because it is so satisfying to see a job come to completion, and it is not truly what I’d describe as a challenging job (Clara could likely do it). In short you use the float to smoosh grout into all of the cracks, trying to scrape off as much excess as you go.

Then to smooth out the grout and further remove some of the excess, you use a slightly damp sponge to wash over the area you simply grouted.

Since I was still reeling from my previous thinset mess, I paid close attention to trying to keep as much grout off my tiles before it dried as I could. It is somewhat of a Sisyphean task (SAT word alert!) because fairly soon you are simply spreading it around. I tried refreshing my water frequently to keep from undoing my wiping too much, but it seemed that my sponge and bucket were black after simply a wipe or two.

But I trudged along and managed to complete the task in about 3 hours.

And simply as I suspected, when things dried out we were left with that pleasant grout-y haze over the tiles. At least this time I was kinda of expecting it, since a post-grout film is something we have dealt with before.

Since I knew I hoped to share this project in as complete a state as possible today, the picture above was not going to do as an “after.” So later that afternoon I went over the floor again with a quite damp sponge and some towels to try to wipe up as much of the haze as possible. It made a large difference. And we truly enjoyed the grout color (this is a better depiction than that lighter-looking photos taken later).

See what I mean about the grout looking lighter in this shot? According to the internetz, it is likely simply haze, and I have read a few suggestions that I am going to try once I give the grout a few more days to fully cure and show its final color (hitting it with too much rinsing/water before it sets can permanently lighten it, so I do not want to over-scrub it prematurely).

One trick involves another 50/50 water & vinegar solution, and if that does not work, there are some grout sealers we can use to boost its color (and even some grout colorants that we could take for a spin if we are feeling so bold) so I will have to keep you posted.

But those little lingering tasks aside, it feels fairly darn good to have this dang floor at last done… ish.

 

The room as a whole still has things we’d like to attend to, like:

• boxing in those wires that snake down the brick
• hanging sconces on each of the columns around the room for eye-height light
• doing something about that groovy intercom on the wall
• adding more appropriate furniture (it’ll eventually all be outdoor-safe like deck furniture)

… but this is in fact the closest it has looked to a wrapped up space since we began this makeover back in August! And since we are not sure how much more we will accomplish out there this season, we thought this was as good a post as any to drop a budget breakdown on you all. Warning: it is a lotta cheddar.

• Wood to finish raw sides where sliding doors were took out: $194
• Contractor to remove ceiling beams: $200
• Electrician to move wires, create 2 fan fixture boxes: $318
• Tongue-and-groove planks for ceiling: $297
• Plywood to fill large triangles on either end: $85
• Trim, paint, primer and caulk: $197
• Fans & downrods: $260
• Self-leveling cement & supplies: $150
• Tile: $680
• Thinset, grout and other tiling supplies: $490
• TOTAL: $2,871

I know, it makes me wince, but what puts that budget into perspective is that simply to replace the old foggy & broken extra-wide sliding doors would have been around $3,200 – and that is without even lofting/planking the ceiling or tiling the floor. In the end, I think we would have been thrilled to spend less, but neither of us hoped to cut corners or low-cost out mid-project. So once we got those broken sliders out, things like lofting the ceiling and tiling the floor became let us-do-this-right choices that we made as we went (instead of shorter term solutions like painting the concrete, which we learned would mean we could not tile it down the line).

And the difference is fairly exciting for us…

In fact, if there is anything I could take back, it’d be some of the time we have poured into the sunroom.

 

Not because I do not like the outcome, but simply that a lot of these tasks seemed to eat up big chunks of time. So here is a quite rough breakdown of time spent working in here over the last two and a half months:

• Removing old sliding doors (more on that here): 5 hours
• Trimming & caulking openings (more on that here): 3 hours
• Demo-ing the ceiling (more on that here): 3 hours
• Coordinating with the contractor & electrician (more on that here): 1.5 hours
• Adding triangle panels (more on that here) and trim, twice (more on that here): 6 hours
• Priming, painting, installing (more on that here) & caulking the ceiling (more on that here): 21 hours
• Installing the fans (more on that here): 1.5 hours
• Prepping the floor by scrubbing it, using self-leveler, and determining the pattern (more on that here): 2 hours
• Tiling, cleaning & grouting the floor: 26 hours
• TOTAL: 69 hours

I am truly bad at keeping track of time stuff, so take that number with a grain of salt. I am also not sure where I mentally drew the line in terms of including / excluding tasks like cleaning, shopping for, driving to pick up, and photographing for the journal – all tasks that can swiftly add up to plenty of minutes that are not necessary representative of how the task will go for everyone. But the point is, it has certainly been a time intensive project – especially since morning sickness has kept us from being the dynamic working duo that we typically are. Thankfully it has fully been worth the effort (and the sweat, and the mumified thinset hands). Plus, look how much our offspring loves it out there…

Aaaaand since this post is not long sufficient already. Sherry asked me to address two details that were asked about the last time we talked about the floor. First, here you can see how I installed those metal edging pieces. I put them and place and then thinsetted right over them before placing my border tile. A few folks asked if they held the tile in place. They do not (that is the thinset’s job) – they are simply aesthetic in providing a pleasant clean edge to the tile job and, in our case, helping your eye see the slight step up from the deck to the tile.

Which leads me to my next follow-up. The deck has consistently been slightly lower than the cement sunroom floor, and that distance has consistently varied slightly around the perimeter of the sunroom, but the metal sliders for the doors that encircled the whole room in fact used to bump things up higher than they are now. So since removing those thick metal door slides and tiling, the transition between the two spaces is in fact less dramatic. After living with it for a while now (the room has been open for over two months and tiled for nearly one) we have not had a single tripping incident, even with tons of kids/relatives/neighbors over, so we do not think we will need any sort of additional transition or step, which we are grateful for. We in fact think the new tile makes the situation a lot less hazardous since the change in flooring is more obvious now. Here is Sherry foot-modeling it for you.

 

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of this post! That is in short like defeating a White Walker or winning the Hunger Games. And speaking of hunger, we are sticking a fork in the sunroom conversion project for the year since the weather is becoming cooler and the thing we are most excited to do next (new furniture!) will likely have to wait until our bank account stops yelling at us – although Sherry trolls Craigslist every night on her phone like a crazy person.

What are you folks hoping to check off your list before winter comes a’ knockin? Or have you had weather (or other) pesky conditions interfering with a project’s progress lately? Boy can I relate.