- Alright, so here we are putting
the last bit of KERDI seal around the edge of this niche
and this helps just kind of to seal it,
make sure no water gets behind it.
You can also do silicon but I just happened
to have a KERDI seal tube available so we're using this.
Okay.
Alright, so now we're gonna put the niche here
into our pre-fabricated hole that we've cut previously
and we can feel the KERDI seal oozing there behind it
and then we'll come back in later and put our screws in
and now it's all sealed behind here
and this down here is you could see is at a slight angle
to make sure that the water drains into the shower.
You never wanna have the bottom of your niche be flat.
You always want it to be slightly angled.
(camera shutters)
Alright, so when we do this niche right here,
this is the bottom shelf that I'm gonna put in here
and as you can see, I've got these three blue spacers here.
These spacers are gonna make this bottom piece sit
at a slight angle coz you always wanna angle the water
down into the thing, down into the shower.
Don't believe what these other bozos tell you
that, "Oh, it's gotta be perfectly flattened up."
It's gotta be at a slight angle and
you can't see it visually, of course
but then once you put your spirit level on here,
it's more than obvious that it's perfectly at an angle.
There we go.
Sitting at a perfect angle.
(camera shutters)
Here we are in the arched niche inside the master bath.
So we've tiled the marble octagons on to the back of it
and we are going to be playing today with our dry fitting.
This is our OG.
These are OG pieces here that are gonna form the border
and these are gonna run down here like this
and so what we're gonna do now is we have to figure out
once we get up to the top of this arch,
we need to cut up about 10 pieces of two-inch OG.
I wanna try to cut 'em so that
they make a nice tiny grout hole that you really can't tell
that you made this arch out of segments.
So the way that we're going to do that
is we're going to measure across the arch
which I've already done that and that's 13 inches
and then we're going to use this compass.
This is a larger compass that allows you
to do a larger sized arch.
Now we're going to trace this on a cardboard
and determine from there how big to cut our little segments.
We're gonna precut them with cardboard
and make sure that they fit perfectly
and then we're going to cut them up.
So here, we've gone ahead and we taped up a few pieces here
just to see how they dry fit together
and this is gonna look really, really nice.
Very classy when it's done.
So you could see, we've cut them at 45 degree angles
so that the horizontal could meet the vertical.
They're gonna go straight up the side here,
they're gonna curve around the arch,
and they're going to come right back down
the other side again to the bottom.
This will look very, very nice when it's done.
Okay, so we're drawing our arch now.
This is the 13-inch diameter here.
So I'm drawing the inside part now
and now, I have the OG piece right here
so now, I need to set the width of that and you can see
I've already marked it here, that pencil mark.
I already know now how wide to make it
and I have set the compass.
I'm going to put the compass back another position here
and I'm going to draw my arch
and that's gonna be the width of our OG pieces.
You can see the arch goes all the way around there.
And now with our OG pieces taped in place,
we also taped in place the template for the arch.
So you could see how the border is gonna continue up here
and that's gonna go up and around the arch
and come right back down the other side.
So now we know we're gonna have tiles
that are cut the right width and everything
and now, we're just gonna make our marks for the segments
throughout the arch of where we're gonna cut.
And now, a few minutes later,
we've marked all of these segments here
and we're gonna trace these out on to the OG tiles
and we're going to cut them.
I've got all my cut OG pieces here and they're numbered
and they're ready to go in order.
And now here, you're looking at the result of
about three hours worth of work.
You wouldn't think it but it takes quite a bit of time
to place all of these tiles
especially these curved segments up here at the top here
coz you have to use all these spacers
and it's a huge game that you keep playing whack-a-mole.
You move one piece and adjust it
and another piece falls out of whack
and then we had to use these wooden custom pieces
that I cut here just to support these arched pieces here
because they were trying to slide.
Even if you have your thinset really super dry
like I had it, it still wants to flow a little bit.
These are very heavy pieces so you gotta support these.
24 hours from now, we will go ahead and grout this.
(camera shutters)
Okay, so we've let the grout dry overnight
and now, here we are.
We're going to start laying the field tiles.
I have a couple of little templates
that you can see up here going around the arch
that will help me determine how to cut my tiles
that are going to go around this arch here, the niche.
What we've done here is
on the second layer up from the floor,
you can see I have this ledger board here
and this is a perfectly straight piece
of bamboo flooring that's machine-edged
so I know it's nice and leveled
and that we have it knocked into the wall here,
nice and leveled, and we're just gonna rest
the second level of tiles right on them.
That way, we know they'll be
at a perfectly straight-leveled line
and all the other tiles as we go up the wall from there
will be perfectly square and leveled.
All we have to do is just make sure
that they're flat and we're using our tile leveling system
with our little spacers there
and our little wedges down here in the bucket.
So you could see, we've got the first two tiles up now
and their spacers are in place
and the leveling wedges are in place.
So now what we're doing is we're applying the thinset
directly to the back of each tile.
We put it on thick.
We're gonna lay it down thick first.
Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead
and trowel it with the half-inch trowel lines
and we're not gonna scrape it all the way
to the bottom of the tile.
You shouldn't hear me scraping when you're troweling
so it just goes nice and smooth, make your groove lines,
and then we'll stick the tiles directly to the wall.
This is much quicker, much more efficient use of time,
it's cleaner, and it's the exact same thing
as if you were to trowel it on to the wall.
I'm just going right on to the tile
and this way, you're gonna make sure
that you have 100% coverage on the back of the tile
and you just simply push the tile in place,
move it around a little,
get it with the mallet, and start leveling it.
Here we are on day two of the tiling here
of the master bathroom.
Here we've gotten a fair amount of the field tiles up
and the accent tiles as well
and you could see of course here,
we're using our tile leveling system here
and these have really been a godsend on these walls here
coz knotting these giant 12 by 24 half-inch thick
travertine tiles, they weigh a ton
and getting them to stay leveled can be a challenge
so having these wedges in here really does the trick here
in keeping them perfectly leveled from tile to tile.
And here is the drain installed back.
(camera shutters)
Leads into the master shower right here
and here you can see we spent quite an amount of time
doing the tiling in here,
especially that niche that you see there.
If you look at the top here, I even added
this stone, the travertine crown along the top.
You don't see that in too many installations
so I thought that would make a nice touch
and this right here took us a couple of days,
took me about two days to cement all of these in.
So there you have it.
(camera shutters)