hi Jane,

If you have any experience at all with crafty type skills, and have a little fun getting your hands dirty, you should be fine.

I did my bath DIY and it was my first tiling job ever -- it turned out much better than I'd expected. I used the cheap American Olean white subways from Lowes and a $40 tile snapper. Made up my own design and used some salvaged wood trim for contrast.

The only thing I'd do differently is invest in an actual tile saw (wet saw) for better cuts and more precision. I later did my kitchen and bought a nice Felker tile saw that I really wish I'd gotten earlier. They run from $300 to $500, but they have great resale value on Craig's List or eBay when you're done, so you can recoup some of the cost.

The books that helped me most were John Bridge's Tile Your World and an old Sunset tiling book from eBay. :)

Go to John Bridges online Tile Forum and hang out there for a while, read all the posts in the "Reference Liberry" to get a feel for how it all works.

The things to consider are:
-- what are the walls made of (drywall or greenboard?) and can you replace them with cement board for the damp areas if necessary, like behind a tub or sink (although I gather that it's acceptable to tile right over drywall anywhere but in a shower or tub stall); and
-- what kind of edge did you wind up with when they finished the floor tiling (is there a baseboard? do you want the cove (curved) base tiles?).
-- do you want to use regular grout and sealer, or epoxy grout with no sealer? Epoxy grout (Latisil's Specralock, also at Lowe's) is harder to apply but doesn't need sealer and supposedly holds color better. Regular grout is much cheaper and easier to use for a beginner. I've now used both, they both look great, and think you should go with whichever appeals to you more.

Use good mortar, the dry white kind in a heavy bag that you mix up yourself. You can get everything you need (Custom's Versabond mortar, trowel, Laticrete grout) at Lowes or Home Depot except for the colored Latisil silicone caulk to match the grout -- you'll need this for the floor-to-wall joints and any corners or places you have tile to wood trim transitions. I special ordered my tubes of Latisil from a tile store online. Also if you'll be using a sealer for the grout, you have to get that online too because the box stores don't carry any of the good brands.

Good luck and have some fun! I know the real tile folks will be along shortly with great advice. :)

Whoops, I just re-read your post and see that the pros already did your tub/shower stalls. In that case, I'd definitely recommend doing the rest yourself -- you don't have to mess with installing cement board at all, just prep the drywall by washing/dusting and smoothing it where necessary.

**Important! (So of course I forgot to mention it before.) The hardest part of the whole job is figuring out exactly where the tiles are going to be laid so that you don't end up with odd tiny cut pieces in the wrong places. Do a lot of measuring, and use a template or stick with the exact tile size and grout-lines marked on it in order to know exactly where everything will go.

The mortar's really kinda fun to work with -- if you can frost a cake, you can tile. :)

Here's going to be the fly in the ointment. If this is going to run all the way around the bathroom, it's going to need to tie in to both the shower AND the tub, and if this wasn't planned for prior to this, it's going to take a miracle for everything to work out right. You may find one or the other ends up being "disjointed" from the rest of the tile in the room.

Well, and here's the other thing. Since the tilers weren't planning to tile the walls around the room, they "finished" the shower and bath areas by laying a column of subway tile vertically at the edges of the tiled areas. So if I were going to continue the job, I would be laying horizontal rows of tile up against the column of vertical tile as opposed to seamlessly continuing the tiling in the shower and tub areas. Will this look really bad?

It'll look like it wasn't planned, and just kind of thrown together.

Well, that's not good.

victoriajane-- Something you might think about-- this would go well with the subway tiles, too-- what about using beadboard for your wainscot? It would then be a completely different material, and therefor would not "depend" on the tile in the shower and bath.

I was actually just about to post a question re: beadboard as an alternative to the tile. I'm assuming it would also be cheaper? I prefer the tile because of the water/mildew issue. But if I painted the beadboard in a semi or high gloss paint, would it hold up pretty well, do you think?

Yes, it would. Matter of fact, alot of period bathrooms end up getting beadboard wainscots.

Or you could do ceramic tile 'beadboard' wainscoting. :)

oh yes, I've seen those at the tile store, circus peanut. But I wonder if I'd run into the same problem with the vertical subway tiles.

"victoriajane-- Something you might think about-- this would go well with the subway tiles, too-- what about using beadboard for your wainscot? It would then be a completely different material, and therefor would not "depend" on the tile in the shower and bath."

I agree with Bill's suggestion here. We just used beadboard wainscot in our bathroom and I think it turned out nicely. My original plan was to use white subway tile, but dh really wanted something a little different, so we ended up using American Olean Sonesta 8x10 tiles laid horizonally. The beadboard meets an outside corner on one side of the tub/shower and then butts up to the tile on the other edge

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