Name: Remodel Carpenters
Price range: $

We’ve installed so many hexagonal mosaic floors that they’re pretty straightforward for us. But straightforward doesn’t mean easy. Mosaic tile has its own rules, and this Albany job touched most of them.

Hexagonal mosaic comes in sheets, with dozens of small tiles held together by a mesh backing. Unlike larger tile, it’s set without spacers. There are too many tiles and too many points of contact to space them individually, so the sheet itself sets the spacing, and the mortar has to hold every piece exactly where it lands. That makes the mortar the whole game. With small tiles on a mesh backing, everything can shift: individual pieces slide, joints pinch or widen, and lines that looked straight start to wander.

The fix is getting the setting just right:

The mortar bed: the right thickness, spread with the right notched trowel, so the tiles bed in fully without mortar squeezing up through the joints.
The timing: standard mortar has a very short window. Set the sheet too early and it floats; too late and it won’t bond.
The setting: each sheet goes down, gets pounded in to embed it evenly, and is then left alone so it doesn’t move at all.

The same is true when hexagonal or penny tile goes on a vertical surface, where gravity works against you as well. There’s simply no way to use spacers. We factor that into our estimates for mesh-backed mosaic tile, because it takes more time and care than its size suggests.

Grout was the other decision. The usual rule is sanded grout for wider joints, since the sand gives it strength and keeps it from shrinking and cracking. The exception is when you have an uneven underlayment and want the grout to dry the way you’ve installed it. Here we used non-sanded grout, and it took a lot of extra work to push it down and fully pack hundreds of small joints.

The bullnose on the tile also wasn’t ideal. The edge pieces didn’t finish as cleanly as we’d have liked and took extra fitting to get right.

It was a lot of work, but we’re happy with the results: a crisp, even hexagonal floor with straight lines and consistent joints across the whole surface.