Tile Takeoffs

We've started planning the bathrooms, which we will get started on doing in a few weeks when the deck is done. This weekend we went to a tile showroom to look at waterproofing membranes and drains, and we browsed some tile catalogs (OK, I browsed some tile catalogs and ran a few things by Noel).

And I did some quantity takeoffs for the tile using Sketchup.

The deal is this: you want to know about how much square footage of tile you need before you order, of course. You can do it the old-fashioned way and just sketch everything out on graph paper and do the math, or you can make a little model of your room (I do this slightly oversized to help do a generous estimate, which I will later round up) and get the computer to calculate everything for you.

I'm lazy. I use the computer and I take the opportunity to work out some design issues.

This is the upstairs bathroom model. The "tile" used in this model is not the real, final tile; I just used some patterns that come with Sketchup to keep track of where I would be putting different tile types.

That high area is the shower (for which I have yet to resolve the issue of a shower door or other enclosure thing). The rest of the room will be a "wet room" with waterproofing run up the wall and a floor drain, so we can wash down the room with a hose if we need to. Not that we often need to wash down rooms with a hose but it does simplify washing floors if you don't have to deal with picking the water up afterwards.

By my calculations, I'll need about 92 square feet of the main tile for the walls. Since what Noel really wants is a nice, simple white subway tile, this will actually not be all that expensive. I'm still working out what I want for floor tiles.

Downstairs, I wanted a more sophisticated look. The tile we found for the powder room is a sort of coppery and mottled, surprisingly like this sample tile in Sketchup. I only need 56 square feet of it to cover the floor and lower walls (another wet room here; if you're going to do a bathroom from the framing inwards I don't see any reason to not make it all waterproof). The tile we want, though, is a lot more expensive, so we might end up spending just as much on the tile for this room as for the whole upstairs bathroom.

A few more tile showroom visits, and checking out a couple more drains, and I think we'll be ready to order materials. Not that we're going to be tiling anytime soon -- we still have a lot of framing and of course all the waterproofing to do -- but with tile it's best to get started early because a lot of manufacturers have long lead times for getting you materials, and things go wrong in the delivery all the time.

posted by ayse on 08/05/12