First Tiling Complete... Telephone Hooked Up

Well, I'm glad I picked a room to practice in! The job is far from perfect. It's not that it's difficult to lay the tile. That is very easy. The hard part is getting the field to be perfectly square and regular.

I had watched videos on youtube and gone to the Home Depot class to prepare. Those were both good things to do. At Home Depot, the guy leading the demo saved me some money because I was planning to buy a more expensive tile saw than I needed. Instead of the $156 version, he lead me to the $88 version.

Even with the preparation, there's nothing like sitting down to do something yourself. Lessons learned by "doing":

• Don't plan your layout to so close to the wall studs. I wasn't sure how far away I wanted to stay, and I wound up going too far under the bottom end of the sheetrock. It was ok for where I started, but the wall wasn't perfectly square (I guess). Even though my tile was in a straight line, it began butting against the 2x4 before long. Bottom line is that I didn't need to start out so close. The base moulding will come down and cover any gaps.
  
• Popping a chaulk line helped only somewhat. It's supposed to help keep you in a straight line, but by the time you spread your thinset over even a small area, you're spilling over that line you laid for yourself and it's not as useful. Sure, you can still use the adjacent segment of the line that isn't covered to help you eyeball it. So it may be useful. Just not as useful as it sounded to me ahead of time.
  
• You absolutely must stand up periodically, step back and get an overview of the field you are laying to make sure everything lines up. I thought I was doing a pretty good job (as good as I could anyway) keeping things in line from my viewpoint on the floor. I didn't want to keep getting up and back down because my knees were hurting already as it was. But occasionally when I had to get up, I could see where the earlier parts I had done weren't lining up. By then, that part of the floor had dried too much to fix it. It really would help to have someone else watching you and telling you where to adjust things.
  
• Try to eliminate distractions once you start. If you have to answer a phone call or deal with anything else, parts of your floor are already drying and can't be fixed if you need it. It took two days to finish this small floor, and not just because I'm new at this. I had neighbors saying hello, and tools I had to go and find. We had to stop for hours and help the AT&T guy run the line up the utility pole!
  
• Avoid using tile with anything but perfectly straight edges. I liked the way this tile looked with the wavy edges, but laying it with consistent spacing was not easy. The spots along the edge that I thought I could use for the spacers were close to the corners. This meant it was difficult for me to run my fingers across the corners to test the height of adjacent tile because I would always bump the spacers (and the tile!).
  

Like I said, the phone guy came to hook up the line. He came by himself, and my dad and I wound up helping him with a lot of stuff like running out wire, raising the PVC conduit up the pole for him, etc. But he was a good guy to talk to about their service. He ran a test for me to see how fast my web connection would be if I chose to get DSL service through them.