Tiling: Part I - The Ditra

The husband and I never planned on doing our tile ourselves so we were a bit nervous about tackling this project but the time came and we couldn't put it off any longer. Due to our inexperience we had one of the local tile setters come over and give us some tricks of the trade. He gave us some awesome tips as well as some that we didn't find overly helpful. Overall though I think just having him come and run through everything with us reassured us enough that we felt like we had a fairly good grasp on what to do.

**I don't want to turn this into a DIY tutorial because I don't feel like we really know what we are talking about here so I 'll just give you a brief run down of what we did.**

Our first step was to prepare the subfloor for the tile. To do this we laid down Ditra. Ditra is an uncoupling membrane that absorbs any movement in the subfloor so that the movement won't transfer to the tile and cause cracking. (Please note that Ditra is not used in all tile applications, this is just what worked for us in our situation.) You want the Ditra to bond with the floor so that it will move when the floor moves. To attach it to the subfloor you lay a thinset like you would when laying tile. One thing we learned the hard way was that you should mix the thinset a bit runnier than what the instructions call for. You want it to hold a notch when troweling but it should be pourable. We mixed our thinset a bit too thick at first and it dried a bit bumpy. We were worried that we were going to have to rip up the Ditra, chisel the thinset off, and start over again but it wasn't as bad as it looked and we were okay.

The instructions on the Ditra state that you can start laying your tile immediately after you have laid the Ditra. We chose to let it set overnight before working on it.

Here's the Ditra in the Laundry Room/Mudroom. This is the area where we mixed the thinset too thick and things weren't as smooth as we would have liked them to be.  

We laid Ditra in two of the bathrooms as well (our lower bath doesn't have a tile floor, so no Ditra in there) and we were careful to mix our thinset properly and we got a much better finished result. You can't really tell from the pictures but it's a lot smoother in the bathrooms. 

Now that we have the Ditra all laid I'll be back soon with a tile update! 

How about you? Have you ever tiled? Do you have any tiling tips for us?