Hey Everyone! One of the key components in our bathroom remodel was changing out the 1970’s green floor tile for something a bit more updated. Several years before we moved into our house this bathroom’s shower was re-tiled, and enough extra tile was purchased to do the floor too. When we moved in we started working on other projects, and the poor tile sat neglected out in the garage until we finally got ready to rehab this bathroom.

Old Green Tile
Once we started renovations After much discussion, I decided that the best way to set the tile in the bathroom was to go directly over the existing floor. The original tile in the house was set on top of a thick mortar bed, and taking up the old tile would have made a mess of this perfectly leveled floor causing us nothing but more work (and more money!). With the proper additive in our thinset and good tiling technique the new tile should stay firmly in place for years to come. Going over the original tile will raise the floor about 1/2″, which we will compensate for with a custom transition in the doorway.
Before starting to mix up mortar, we did a quick test layout to get a rough idea of how the tiles were going to lay out.

Testing tile layout
Next I picked a starting spot; in such a small space, the room being out of square shouldn’t be too much of an issue but it’s always a good idea to check. For the bathroom I decided to start tiling against the tub, this gave me a great straight line to start from, and allowed me to control the size of the grout joint at the tub (I wanted this to be as thin as possible since this is the spot most likely to get discolored from water).
We mixed up our thinset mortar with a good latex additive instead of water to increase the bond strength and then it was time to tile. This is the one we used:
Get it here
Check out this great video about the correct way to trowel out thinset if you haven’t done it before –
Once the tile was set, we let it dry for a day and then put down some grout. What a difference it makes!
Let us know if you have any questions!
– John