Older homes settle. Over decades the framing shifts, so walls go wavy, floors lose their plane, and corners drift out of square. None of that matters much until you try to tile it. Tile is flat, straight and square, and it shows every place the house isn’t.
This Berkeley client wanted a tile baseboard to go with the new bathroom floor. A tile base looks clean and stands up to mopping far better than painted wood, but it puts a straight, rigid line right against the wall, where the waviness is easiest to see.
The answer was to bed the baseboard out, floating each piece off the wall so the top edge runs straight even where the wall behind it doesn’t. I set the pieces on dollops of polymer-modified mortar, which grips well and was plenty strong for a baseboard. Then I back-filled the gaps behind with grout. The result is sturdy, and the line reads straight from across the room.
The toilet drain opening was its own small problem. A round hole in the middle of a floor tile is hard to make cleanly on a wet saw, so I free-handed the cut with a Black Widow diamond blade on the angle grinder. It takes a steady hand and some patience, but it lets you follow the curve closely, so the flange sits right and the toilet base covers the edge.
The last detail came from the tile itself. This Daltile wasn’t the highest-end line, and its body, the cross-section you see when you cut it, is terracotta colored. Any cut edge left exposed would show a reddish stripe against the glazed face. So along the top of the baseboard I built a small berm, a half-mitered joint, to hide that edge. Most people would never consider it. Once you’ve seen it, though, you can’t unsee it.
None of this shows up as a line item. Grout, putty and caulk can hide a lot of tolerance, but the goal is to need them as little as possible. In an older house, that means working with the walls and floors you have, one piece at a time.
If you have an older bathroom that needs a new floor, you can get a ballpark from our tile estimator, or send photos for a real price within 24 hours.
