Tile in the Rear Entry and Laundry

This project was interesting because of the things around it. A few years ago the client discovered that the floor in the powder room through the door to the right had failed due to a leaky toilet. The person they hired to make the repairs removed the hardwood and rotten subfloor from the bathroom, covered the new subfloor with cement board and then installed 18 square feet of ceramic tile. Mrs. Client liked the tile so much that, over the course of a few months, as budget would permit, purchased additional boxes of the tile hoping that one day the rear entry from the garage and the laundry room could be covered with the same tile. What she didn’t know was if she had purchased enough tile to do the entire space.

The rear entry was covered with finished-in-place hardwood and flowed from the rear entry into the kitchen and beyond. The floor in the laundry was a resilient flooring product installed over ¼” underlayment over subfloor.

First the hardwood had to be removed. A cut was made in the opening between the rear entry and the kitchen. The baseboards and shoe moldings from both the rear entry and the laundry room were carefully removed and labeled for future use. Then the hardwood flooring was removed from the entry and an adjoining coat closet. The flooring and underlayment from the laundry was removed after the washer and dryer were taken from the room.

To prepare the subfloor for ceramic tile, ½” cement board was applied, secured with fortified thin-set and concrete screws. Then a leveling compound was poured over the cement board to produce an almost perfectly level floor. After curing, the first tiles were placed adjacent to the tile previously laid years earlier in the powder room. This resulted in an island of tile being laid on the first day before the islands could be completed the second day. A sloped metal transition strip was placed between the tile and the hardwood floor in the kitchen. And Mrs. Client had guessed right on how much tile to buy: a half box remained at the end. After curing for 24 hours, grout left over from the powder room project was applied to the tile. The baseboard and shoe moldings were replaced. After another 72 hours of curing time, the tile was sealed and the laundry appliances returned to their proper place.