Things started out like this

And we had high hopes of getting it done in one day. But, you might have guessed from the title of this post that well, that didn’t happen. Stupid quarter round, making sure everything lined up and cramped spaces made for not a fun time. Sigh. But we did make some really good progress.

After picking up more quarter round we laid everything out

Our idea was to attach the quarter round to the outside edge first, then tile the outside face. By tiling the edge first we made sure that the line on the top was straight and even

See that middle quarter round sliding out of place? Yeah, it was a bitch to make sure that didn’t happen ALL THE TIME. So to help hold it up we tiled the front face as we went along

We quickly got to the corner where we had a complete mind fuck trying to figure out what the hell to cut the two quarter rounds at to create a seamless transition

Now, normally I’m the good one with angles and spatial arrangement and so we leave those tasks to me, but my brain could not wrap around this one (I blame it on pregnancy brain to make myself feel better). The whole thing was complicated by the curve of the quarter round. Normally you can just split the angle, but this was NOT that easy. There was a lot of time messing around with the tile saw trying to figure things out

Finally after about 45 minutes we figured it out. I mean, Chris figured it out. And I would be a good blogger if I could explain to you what 2 angles we had to cut into each piece of bullnose, but I still don’t really get it, so we’ll just move on…

edit by chris: It came down to bisecting both the miter and bevel angles (a compound miter cut). The neo angle on the shower is a 45 degree angle made up with two 22.5 degree cuts. I cut a piece of scrap plywood to 11.25-ish degrees to get that angle. Then I tilted the blade to 22.5 degrees to bisect the 45 degree bevel that the bullnose rests on. Easy peasy. Just took 45 minutes to get it all setup and figured out. 🙂

We got to this point at lunchtime

And then Chris said, “I wish we had run the tiles horizontally.” We thought about it during lunch, came back, still thought the same thing and then ripped off all the tiles

And then started again

It took about an hour or 90 minutes to get caught up the the same point, but I think it looks a lot better and that Chris was totally right. By running them horizontally it continues the same pattern as the wall so it doesn’t stick out as much.

Once the right and center faces were complete, we moved on to the last outside edge and face

That outside edge took a decent amount of time because the spacers kept falling out, things weren’t lining up (the mud job underneath has to be perfectly rounded to make things really nice and easy), and so there may have been a lot of cussing involved, but in the end it looks very nice

Now that all the outside edges and faces were done, we moved on to the inside edge. For the same reason we wanted the inside edge tiled first so that the top tiles would be laid straight and even

Again, it was slow going being so precise and accurate. We had to make sure that the pitch from outside edge to inside edge was correct so that water doesn’t sit on top of the curb, but instead runs into the shower pan

And that’s where things stopped. Knees were achy, patience had run out, and our thinset was getting pretty thick and spent. I knew the curb would be hard, but I had no idea it would be so anger inducing. The good news is that we only have the inside face and top left to do

And hopefully that goes a lot faster. And hopefully our achy knees will be a lot less angry with us.