SF Condo Tile Bath Surround And Floor, May, 2023

This San Francisco condo bath looked like a straightforward job: a subway tile tub surround and a new floor. It stopped being straightforward once I checked the fit of the tub, which I should have done first.

A tub that didn’t fit its space

The tub was about an inch too small for its footprint. Normally, once backer board is installed, the tub’s lip sits tight against the walls, and the tile, set on a bed of mortar everywhere except that lip, sits neatly just inside it. Here the gap was too big for that to work.

So the wall had to be brought out to meet the tub. It was furred out, and then the tile was bedded out as much as an inch on the side away from the shower head. That meant a lot of mortar, and every tile had to be positioned and leveled individually, in the right plane. It also meant pacing the work. Tile in a thick mortar bed can slump and shift if too much goes up at once, so only so much could be done each day. What was planned as a day-and-a-half job took four.

Steel studs

The walls were framed with steel studs, which is common in condos. Steel studs are inexpensive and go up fast, which is exactly why builders use them. But they’re light and not especially rigid, and they give tile work less to push against than solid wood framing. On walls like these, the backer and every fastener have to be right, because the framing won’t hide much.

Black grout, and what it costs

The client wanted a decorative, vintage look: white subway tile in a classic pattern with black grout. It’s a striking look. But black grout behaves a lot like black paint: it gets on everything, it stains the tile surface, and it’s very difficult to clean up. Every tile has to be worked clean, carefully, without pulling grout back out of the joints. For the look it offers, especially across a large area, it comes with real costs: in our experience, it roughly triples the time it takes to grout.

How it ended

This job was meant as an audition. The general contractor who hired us was considering us for as many as two hundred similar baths. It didn’t work out. We were strung along, and between the substrates we were being asked to tile over and the way the relationship was handled, we decided to go our separate ways.

The work itself is clean, and the best we could do with what we had. Sometimes the job you’re proudest of isn’t the easiest one, and sometimes the right decision is to walk away from the next two hundred.

Planning a bath remodel? See what we install, or send photos for an estimate.