Install Natural Stone Tile in Your Home

I’m Mark Le Mon Project Manager and you’re learning how to tile. We’re going to be installing natural stone. We’re using a compound thin set mix that’s premixed. You can also use the dry and bag version but I recommend when you’re doing walls to use the premix. It’s a lot easier and faster. You want to have on hand a bucket of water and a sponge, of course your stone, a trough, a tape measure, pencil, and a wax pen for marking off your designs and your cuts. Okay as you see, I’ve already finished one wall complete. It’s ungrouted and I’ll be moving over to this wall over here which we’re going to continue across the kitchen face. And we’ll be cutting around some outlets and some switches. So let me get this measured out and I’ll be back with you in just a minute. I’ve pre-cut these corner troughs to match up with the distance of the length of the tile to cut around the corner. In position, it will look like that. I’m going to continue that across to get up to our outlets and then we’re going to cut around the outlets so let me show you how you do that. First, you’re going to take—it will be a compound. You’ve seen many times where people were coming put it across the whole wall but because we have many cuts that we’re going to be doing, I want to make sure that we have a nice, clean wall to work with and not have anything sticking to any tiles that we don’t want in the way. We’re taking a full piece tile now and I’m putting this inside right here on this edge. Leaving a little bit of space and have the next tile to go in place. As I go along, I check to make sure that the edges are lined up. If they’re not, I want to pull off the tile and I want to build up the compound enough so that everything is nice and flat. Alright, so I’ve put this in place nice and lined up. Every so often I want to come back with a wet sponge. I want to clean off any excess thin set that is on there, so that it stays nice and pristine after everything is all dried. If you see any areas that some of the compound has come through where you’re going to caulk, you just push a little blade in there just like that. In this type of application where you have a very tight grout line, we’ll be using non-scented grout when we grout this. Unless the grout do penetrate a very small area. Be careful when working these, they are very sharp. You want to separate this on from the wall and you want to lay your tile in place over the hole and then mark off the outside part of the box where you’re going to make your cuts and the bottom of the box where you’re going to make your cuts. We’re going to place our tile over the hole. We’re going to mark on the outside area, on both sides of the outlet. You’re going to slide it to one side and you’re going to find your bottom, we’ll bring the pencil to your bottom, you’re going to mark off your bottom. Now you’re going to square cut this right here and that will be your outlet. So I’ve taken these pieces which I’ve hand cut and hand honed using a belt sander to grind and round off the corners of the edges and then you take a wet sponge or just probably about 200 grit underwater in your hand, polish this and you have your finish corners which should match up beautifully and give you a nice finish rounded edge. It’s good to number these pieces because not every wall is going to be absolutely square, so this is why you know exactly what order they go into the wall. Take them and you push them into the wall so they would have a nice appearance. Smoothen up, finish your edge off, and prepare to sponge after your last piece. Alright the last piece is in, clean out your grout lines, okay there you have it.