Questions & Answers

Hello,

I know this forum is mostly about showers and waterproofing, but does anyone in here know anything about Saltillo tile?

I was about to tile my fireplace and I decided to rip up the white floor tile on the hearth because it was cracking. This floor tile was cracking in several places all over the room. So I pulled it up (it came up easily) and found Saltillo tile underneath. So now I'm on a side quest of restoring the Saltillo.

A previous homeowner had just installed tile over it and carpet over other parts of it. I'm pretty sure it's original to the house. Luckily the person who installed the tile over it did not use anything but mortar, so the Saltillo came out mostly unscathed.

My parents have a floor buffer so I borrowed that and used Ecolab and Zep stripper with the black pads. I got…

I am building a curbless shower. I hired a professional to hotmop the the pan. It is a second-floor OSB subfloor. I recessed the floor a few inches for a pre-slope, hot-mop, and then an inch of deck mud. When he did the hot-mop, he extended the hotmop about a 18 inches onto the bathroom floor. How do I tile that? I was planning to use Ditra as an uncoupling membrane. I was going to put the ditra on up to the curbless edge, put in the deck mud to make it even with the Ditra. How do I bond the ditra to the hotmop overlap? I cannot find an example or solid suggestions.

With 1/4" cement board over subfloor, I have about 1" from the top of my floor trusses. Could I make dry pack work if I fastened plywood between the trusses, a couple inches below the top of trusses and filled with dry pack? With the drain centered on a 6' shower, the dry pack would be sloped within 1/4" of the top of the trusses. Could the trusses be treated to hold that thin layer of dry pack? Or maybe cut the dry pack away from trusses after curing and prime trusses and fill in void with thinset?

I’m going to be installing a seal system shower (I think that’s what it’s called, with a FloFX bonding flange) in my pier and beam house I’m building. Shower base is 76”x42” over 3/4” Advantech plywood. One of my many questions is this: can I use 1/4” cement board (could only find PermaBase in my area) as an uncoupling membrane of sorts? I am going to install it throughout the rest of the bathroom and laundry room floors and figured I could run it continuously into the shower floor as well, including under the concrete curb I’m going to pour. Then when I install my deckmud, it can bond to the cement board. Would I need to still install tar paper and wire lath before deck mud if I did it this way? Thanks in advance. And sorry for the blurry picture, it’s a screen shot from a video I took.