Replacing Your Own Bathroom Tile

My landlord isn’t the utmost on upkeep of his properties and prefers it seems to just cover up something instead of fixing it correctly. For examples my kitchen, bathroom, and laundry room floors. When we moved in, he told us someone was coming to tack down the top layer of flooring on Monday of the next week. The person never showed up and that was over a year ago. So duct tape it is, holding down my floor to the layer below it. This works ok in every room but the bathroom where one layer of flooring is laying on top of another and curls up at the edges. With three boys and a husband the floor is bound to receive a spraying of urine at some point during the day. The problem with this is it gets between the layers and you can’t get it out. Here lies the need to replace the flooring.

I decided to replace the floor when we could no longer stand the smell and cleaning the toilet daily did nothing to alleviate the odor. Now I’m a first time floor person, I’ve never even considered doing my own tile before this. But, how hard could it be? I went to my local Menards and asked the salesperson for help. The employee was very helpful and knew exactly what I needed, and helped me find what I wanted.

You can purchase self adhesive floor tiles at Menard’s by the tile or by the box from$ .26 to $.69 a tile. I choose the cheap stuff, why mess up with the expensive stuff and besides it’s for a property I plan on moving from very soon.

I now have the tile I need; now I have to remove the old flooring. This proved to be the greatest challenge of the whole project, next to getting my husband off the couch to help. I started with a straight glass scraping razor that I purchased from Wal-Mart for $1.97 and came with five replacement blades, and a spray bottle of water that I had laying around the house. This was the slowest idea I’ve ever had. I then remembered the wallpaper steamer we had purchased about a year ago that I had in storage. I found the steamer to be the greatest help of all. It loosened the tile from the floor along with melting the glue from the old tiles so with a little elbow grease the entire floor came up with less effort than my first idea of the spray bottle. The steam was also a help with sterilization of the urine and other icky things that were under the tile. It was chemical free and made scraping up the tile a breeze.

After removing all of the tile and glue from the bathroom, I placed a fan in the bathroom overnight to help get rid of any moisture left by the steamer to insure that the new tile adhered as well as possible. After drying the floor, I started along the straightest wall in the bathroom and began to peel and stick the tiles. These tiles are very easy to install. In less than three hours I had the bathroom retiled and ready to use. This included reseating the toilet with a new wax ring after I took the toilet up to tile properly under it. This is a project that I believe any person could probably handle and the wallpaper steamer was a definite bonus that didn’t require the use of harsh chemicals and had duel results.