I’ve always enjoyed installing residential tile. There’s something about thinking creatively and making an artistic statement that appeals to me with the challenge. To express a customer’s design vision calls for good communication skills and at least some intuition. Making a customer happy and feeling comfortable in their home environment makes me happy, too. Nothing can compare to the satisfaction of knowing a job has been well done, in seeing a beautiful and properly installed tile job. And, indeed, a glass mosaic tile installation can look fantastic. This glass mosaic installation sure was a challenge in it’s complexity.
A short while ago Debbie and Rich asked me to finish a bathroom that would include tiling a steamer/shower surround with glass mosaic tile, for shower pan, walls, and ceiling. They chose a transparent glass mosaic called Tesserra red #777, non-iridescent, by Oceanside Glasstile of Long Beach, Calif. I believe they wanted to see as well as feel the red hot heat of a steam bath. The glass mosaic tiles were of the same red hue, but randomly varied in saturation: some glass tiles were darker or lighter than others.
Each one inch square handmade mosaic glass tile was a quarter inch thick with a finished face surface that was seemingly chipped, crazed, or irregular, not smooth. The tiles came in sheets twelve inches square, face glued to brown backing paper with a water soluble adhesive similar to that used for wallpaper. The tiles reminded me of chipped ice cubes, with sides tapered away from the face and a flat back slightly textured from molds. Most tiles were fairly square, some were slightly trapezoidal in shape, as the molten glass poured into the molds overflowed a sixteenth inch to form a sheet that was broken apart after cooling.
The bathroom had been framed in and sheetrocked walls and ceiling before my involvement, with green board placed in the steamer/shower surround area. I wanted to jump right in, assuming I could apply a builder’s felt paper moisture barrier over the greenboard, then install cementitious backerboard and parge it with a waterproofing membrane to contain steam. But, being a relative beginner to any mosaic tile installations, it was a good thing that I had some uncertainty, so I decided to talk first to Oceanside’s technical support experts.
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