Bathroom update - Floor

It's been a while, welcome back. The floor and the loo have gone in since we last updated you and the basin is... well... kind reader, read on!

Loo first. Dave got on with putting in the remaining backer boards behind the toiet and the tiles at his leisure during the week, and also planed off the slighly protruding part of the shower tray support. Sadly, that did impinge somewhat on the shower tray itself, so he stopped that PDQ. We'd already decided we were going to tile the vertical surfaces so it didn't really matter, but we ordered some stone effect 1-inch microtiles for the job (on back-order from good old Topps Tiles).
Once the back wall was done, he turned his attention to the floor. You remember they cowboys who built this house popped both loos on a pile of concrete? Well as much as we tried, we couldn't really get the floor flat. Dave initially tried it with tile cement but that took days to dry. The final solution was to knock off all the proud bits (SDS drill) then use self-levelling compound to give us a flat floor. We did that really successfully back in Wilcote Road days (in the kitchen) so were confident it would do the trick. The only decision we had to make was whether to level the whole floor or just the loo section. Dave played it by ear and stuck with the loo section.

On to the actual tiling. Now marble is unforgiving and we didn't want to rip our feet to shreds with uneven corners or edges, so we decided to use a floor levelling system where you placed inverted T shaped spacers under each tile and then pushed in a wedge to bring the edges flush to each other. Clever idea really. Pulls everything up to the same level, rather than trying to push down in to tile cement. We also hired a proper water cooled tile cutter. Yes, I know we bought one for the wall tiles, but it struggled with ceramics and there was no way it was going to handle marble. Dave spent several days cutting tiles and dry fitting the floor, including the fiddly bit around the towel rail pipes. Eveything was neatly stacked in order to had over ready for the weekend. We had previously discovered that you can't lay floor tiles on premixed cement, so we'd acquired a suitable supply of dry mix tile cement, a couple of buckets and a small version of the cement mixing drill attachment (we had a big one we bought to destroy apples when making cider a few years ago, but that was too big) for smooth muck mixing.
It was time. No more prep was humanly possible. The cement was precision mixed and brought in to the bathroom - spreading and tiling commenced, with Dave doing the buttering and laying, me handing over tiles, spacers and wedges in the right order.

24 hours before we could walk on it, so one last shower in the office.