Limestone Tile Part 1 of 5

Welcome back to my tile blog. It's been a while, but I'm been a little busy. This job started on January 10th 2010. I started out having to remove the 900 sq. ft. of existing tile. The demo took about a week. I had three helpers with me and three jack-hammers to chip the old tile off of the concrete floor. Lots of dust, sweat and tears. That was hell week. After the tile was removed, I went through and fine tuned the floor. This is where I cleaned and smoothed out the high and low points. Filling holes and repairing cracks. Then I had to mix up some floor mud to repair some of the steps. After the mud dried and the floor was level and clean, I could paint on the RedGard anti-fracture membrane. I should get sponsored by these guys for publishing their name. This stuff works great in showers for waterproofing too. After a day of putting two coats of the RedGard on, I could start the layout plans. As you can see this is a pretty complex design. The good thing is that the way the pieces fit together, it won't allow you to drift too much. If you do start to drift the pieces won't fit properly anymore. So that kind of helps you stay straight. The though provoking work was going around corners and into other rooms. That always hard but even more confusing trying to follow a crazy pattern like this. Well don't worry to much about me, I did it all by my self and survived. So enjoy the pics.

Front of house from driveway. Refer to this pic from time to time as you brows these posts. The layout can get confusing. The brown door is the "front door" and there is a walkway that connects the house to the garage.

This pic was taken from the ledge of the fish pond looking into the dining room and kitchen. Walkway to garage is right of dining room.

This pic was taken from the entry to the garage walkway.

Limestone Tile Part 2

The following are picture of the kitchen and a back bar that runs between the back of the kitchen and the living room.
This pic shows how the back bar runs behind the double refrigerators.

This is the back bar. You can see wine holders on the left and a wine cooler in the back.

Limestone Tile Part 3

To the left you can see the "front door". As you go down the hall you can reach the library and bedrooms. There are also two bathroom about midway down the hall to the left. Fish pond is on the right.

This is looking into one of the two bathrooms from the hall way. These stone walls are solid from the outside in. It took 18 month for two masons to complete.

This is another hallway that leads to a living room (where this pic is taken from), the kitchen (on the left) and the basement (first door on right). Home owner sampling reclaimed wormy maple to replace the carpet.

This was the original tile. They used granite for the steps. You can see where the tile was starting to crack and break apart on the bottom step. This was remedied by reshaping the concrete with floor mud, then using fiberglass drywall tape for extra security and painting two coats of RedGard on top.
This is an example of the RedGard waterproofing/anti-fracture membrane.

Limestone Tile Part 4

The following pictures are of a walkway that goes from the main house to the garage.

This shot was taken from the driveway looking into the walkway.

Here you can see the landing going down into the walkway.

Steps again going down into the walkway.

The concrete here was cracked from settling of the house. After removing the original tile (pictured below), I repaired the crack and covered it with a waterproofing/anti-fracture membrane called RedGard.

Limestone Tile Part 5

Fossils: The great thing about working with natural stone is the variations in the color, texture and every now and then finding pieces of history. Throughout this job I located tons of fossilized sea shells. The following are three pics of the biggest fossils I found.

This final pic is to show how I butted up against the natural stone walls. In this case, I was able to tile underneath the stones a bit. Otherwise I would just try to cut the tile to fit as close as possible to the stone walls and fill the gap with grout.