How to Retile Your Bathroom in 6 Easy Steps!

1. Plan ahead. Remember, your bathroom will be out of commission for a few days.

Grip the handle of a screwdriver, and wedge its blade beneath the tiles, stab and jam, push down until you hear that pop, until the tile breaks in half and makes an edge sharp enough to cut. You will not cut yourself, obviously. Nothing dramatic is happening. Your fingers are powerful in their yellow rubber work gloves, your hands are steady, your mind is clear. You are ready. The ugly fucking tile is only the beginning of what you’ll accomplish. You are coming for the treacherous tub, the affected half-shell sink, the deceitful picture of a sailboat hanging over the toilet. You hate that picture, hate all nautical bathroom decor and its insistence that the toilet trigger thoughts of the ocean. You are sure it is the reason your children tried to flush their fish to freedom.

Take a deep breath. Stand and wipe sweat from your forehead with your wrist. Lift the picture off the wall and throw it into the hallway with the rest of the trash. Say, “Fixed.” The ghost of the picture remains as a stubborn square of darker green. Do not worry. You will repaint. This has been a long time coming, which is almost the same as being prepared.

2. Buy supplies.

Plastic sheeting. Masking tape. Utility knife. Chisel. Hammer. There must be a hammer somewhere, but do not go into the garage to look. You want your own hammer. Chalk-line tool. Thinset. Spacers. Level. Wet saw. Tile nippers. Tile-cutting bit. Water-resistant silicone caulk.

Do not go to the store to buy these items. You did not bear children so that you could go to the store. Your younger son is in his room fooling around with his girlfriend, who stayed the night. Pretend you do not know this. Pretend you are sending your older son because he is downstairs finishing breakfast, clearly available, and not because your younger son might refuse to go. Your older son will complain that this is unfair. He is correct. It is also unfair that your husband has left you for the orthodontist. It is unfair that he did not leave you years ago, when you still had many different people you wanted to fuck and many frequent-flier miles. It is unfair that you never learned how to walk in heels and unfair that you might need to again. It is unfair that you got a C in that art class in college and stopped drawing and unfair that your coworker overheard you calling her a bitch and unfair that polar bears are stuck on melting ice floes and unfair that mosquitoes carry malaria and it is unfair and unfair, and your son will see it in your expression and will not want to know what you are thinking. He will go quietly to the hardware store. You believe in not telling your children about your problems. Well done, you, for keeping that all inside. You are a good mother. When you have made this bathroom beautiful, you will be an even better one.

While your son buys supplies, there will be a lull in the action. Do not let it shake your passion for home improvement. There is some beer in the refrigerator. Carry a bottle out to the backyard and take a single sip. It is morning. It is spring. It is Saturday. The climbing vines are budding with purple flowers and will pull down the wooden fence soon if you don’t take care of them. It is too early for beer but it is also too early for drama and this is why you are not crying, you are not prostrate, some absurd caricature of an abandoned woman, no, you are standing in the sun, waiting for step 3 to take charge of your life.

3. Use a chalk-line tool to mark lines for the tile installation. The tub, toilet, and sink will create some challenges, especially for the amateur tile cutter, but do not be discouraged!

The tiles your son brings home are larger than you pictured and less blue.

“This is what blue looks like,” your son says. He needs a haircut, and you sweep his bangs from his eyes, the better to see him scowl.

The blue looks worse when you take it into the bathroom. Blame the green paint. Your son informs you that the hardware store did not have a chalk-line tool. He has brought you a yardstick and a box of chalk from the playroom turned guest room turned storage room. This will work fine. Your Norwegian foremothers did not have fancy chalk liners. They laid tile using their eyes and their keen spatial reasoning. They sailed boats using the stars. Their forearms never tired when kneading dough or giving hand jobs. When their husbands fucked orthodontists, they killed them.

Do not remember the many times the orthodontist had her hands in your sons’ mouths, stretched their lips as wide as hungry baby birds’. Do not imagine those hands on your husband’s body. Do not imagine the two of them in bed, making plans for a weekend of cycling, an activity you’ve always hated, nothing but a slower, harder way to go somewhere. Worse still, do not imagine them talking about you, discussing how you took the news, indulging in guilt, feeling good about feeling sorry for you. Worst of all, worst beyond anything, is that your husband is a mostly good man, as you are a mostly good woman. You want to call him and tell him you are glad he is gone, that you had been thinking about leaving him once the boys were out of the house. You want to call him to tell him to go fuck himself, you want to yell and scream and terrify him, not enough to make him come back, though perhaps that too, but just enough that he begins to wonder what you are capable of, if after all these years you have hidden depths.

Do not do this. He will not believe you have hidden depths. You struggle to believe it yourself.

Instead, put your yardstick next to a piece of tile and measure it. Measure it again. Write down the measurement to make sure you aren’t going to make a mistake. Now take what you have written, ball it up, and flush it down the toilet. You are confident. You are not afraid to make mistakes. You thrive on the unknown. Pick up your piece of chalk and draw a long white line across the floor of the bathroom. Draw another and another. You are the queen on this chessboard. When you are done—and here is a tricky part—look at the strange shapes you have made, the places where your perfect squares run into obstacles and become puzzle pieces.

Feel the weight of the tile cutter in your hand, the blade like a large X-Acto knife. Draw the cut you will make on the back of the tile. Measure as best you can. This can be delicate work. Be firm when you press down on the blade, but don’t be sudden. Do not shatter a whole tile to remove only a corner.

4. Spread thinset mortar on the floor. The thinset should be as thick as the tile you are placing down.

You feel confused, but do not be alarmed. Yes, the thinset seems like it will hide the chalk lines you spent two hours drawing. Perhaps this set of directions is not the best set of directions on the internet. Perhaps you could have done more research. What is important is that you keep the picture of the lines in your mind. This should be easy to do. Just look at them. Think of all the things you already have in your mind, things harder to remember. The first five digits of pi. The Gettysburg Address. The address of your first apartment. The way to address a duke or a viscount or a queen, your grace, my lord, your majesty. The smell of pot in your youngest’s backpack and the taste of the joint you took from it. The first time you touched your clitoris and the bafflement you felt, how you pressed and poked and wondered if you were broken. The first time you orgasmed, how it wasn’t that great, intense but short, the sensation superficial but the victory over yourself sweet. The image of the Earth rising over the moon. Your newborn sons, disgusting and beautiful. The tang of milk one day past good. Your father dying suddenly two thousand miles away. Your dog dying in your arms because the vet said it would keep the animal from panicking. The way your husband stood, defiant and guilty, telling you he wanted to be happy. The way he said in love. The way he clutched those words to him like a kitten he was proud of saving, like you were the tree he’d pulled it from. The way he held your hip when you couldn’t sleep, stroked your hair like your mother used to. The way your mother braided your hair too tight. Don’t squirm like that, Miranda. The way you laced your sons’ shoes too tight, Don’t squirm like that, double knots, always worried they would trip. After all that, these chalk lines and bathroom tiles are nothing. They will hold you now. They will keep you from panicking.

5. Place your tiles. Be patient, be gentle. Let them dry in place.

You should not have spread thinset over the entire floor. Look again at the directions. And if the directions were not specific, then you should have been thinking for yourself, thinking a few steps ahead. You are fucking this up. You fuck everything up. This is embarrassing for you. Your children are in their rooms feeling embarrassed for you. Your friends are in their homes feeling embarrassed for you. It is getting dark outside. Your husband is not coming home from his brother’s tonight or any other night. Your husband is definitely not at his brother’s. You are sleeping alone.

Take off your shoes and socks, and hold a stack of tiles in your arms. Tiptoe across the wet thinset as quickly as you can and climb into your tub. Set the tiles down beside you, then lean out of the tub and place the tiles where you can reach. See? This is not so hard. This is okay. Feel lucky that your bathroom is small and your arms are long. Consider giving up and staying in this tub forever. Now leave the tub. Do it now. And don’t step on the tiles you have already put down and ruin your work. You will have to stand on the thinset, on the very frontmost balls of your feet, to lay down the tiles around the toilet, the tiles you cut with such care. They fit. It is an enormous accomplishment. They fit almost the way you imagined. Press the tiles down as quickly as you can, and when they are in place, get back out of that bathroom. The patch of thinset near the door looks like small animals have run through it. Your toes are glued together and your feet stick to the carpet. Pull a sliver of tile out of your heel and see how it bleeds only a little and not for long. Kneel, careful of the pile of debris, and lay down those last pieces of tile. Look at that.

Now wait. This is the hardest part. Wait without losing focus, without asking if this was such a good idea, without feeling too much, you are already so good at this kind of waiting, how different are waiting and continuing to be alive, and if your husband is done waiting, then you are happy for him and so, so angry.

Keep yourself busy while you wait. Go downstairs and check on your children, see that your oldest son has made macaroni and cheese, is feeding his brother, is stepping up, what a good son, you hate that he needs to be a good son, hate him for a moment for taking everything on himself, as if this is all about him and not you, not a hurt that can be only yours, a wound you can nurse without worrying about anyone else. Sit down at the table. Smile and ask them if they’ve had good days. Smile and hold that smile on your face as your oldest holds his. Your youngest doesn’t look up from his phone but that doesn’t mean he isn’t watching. They are waiting too. Feel, for a moment, how much you love them both, feel it too strongly, it feels the same as hating them, feel it so much it would only upset them, feel it until it hurts and you want to run your fingers through their hair and kiss their foreheads and hug them violently, and so instead rise from the table and say, No rest for the wicked! like you’re Glenda the good fucking witch on a mission from God.

The mess in the upstairs hallway is still there. Someone is going to get hurt. You should really clean it up, and yet you like the chaos of it, the way it embodies you, sustains you even as you realize you are exhausted. You sit on the floor and pick up one shard of tile at a time, dropping them clink by clink into your new plastic bucket. If you were someone else, this might be meditative. From downstairs, you can hear the murmur of your sons’ voices but you cannot hear what they say. Your youngest laughs as they clear the table. Soon they come upstairs, say good-night to you, on the floor with your bucket, and go into their rooms to press their earbuds in as deep as they will go.

Once you are alone, sit on the kitchen counter and soak your feet in the sink, since you cannot use the bathtub. Watch the hot water flush your calves. Wait to see if the thinset will wash away without taking your skin.

6. Check to make sure your tiles have set. Wait twelve hours, twenty-four if you can, and then apply the grout in the space between each tile. Let dry.

You are almost done. You are running down the hill now. Feel the wind at your back, the grass between your toes, the blue jay who sometimes sits on your fence chirping with joy, but do not let this feeling of accomplishment rush you. A good grouting is essential to the long-term health of your bathroom floor. Fill every crack. Check around every tile, level the grout with a wooden coffee stirrer, and when you are sure you have been thorough, set the tub of grout on the ugly half-shell sink.

Look at your work.

It is not any better than the previous bathroom floor. In fact, it is worse. Your tiles are crooked and do not lie flat. They dip and jut as if riding the last of the wake from a now-distant ship. Your grout work is good. You were careful and diligent. But accept that water will always find a way to sneak between the grout and the tile, between the tile and the floor. That little by little, mildew will grow and rot, will eat away at the floor and the floor will get soggier and weaker and a water spot will appear on the ceiling of the living room and you will pretend it is not there and the spot will spread until one day when you are sitting on your couch alone watching television the ceiling will cave in and you will be killed in a shower of not-quite-blue bathroom tiles.

This is a worst-case scenario. This is years away. Lie down on the cool tile floor. Your cool tile floor. Relax. Let your fists clench, then unclench. Relax your toes, your calves, your thighs, your stomach, your neck, and your mouth. Feel that your fingers are weights. Feel every task they have ever performed. Feel them drag your entire body down. And when you think you might finally relax, might accept that the tiles are crooked but still your own, open your eyes to see your oldest son in the doorway. He is worried about you. His hands are shoved into his pockets. He wants and does not want you to speak to him like the grown man he almost is. And maybe that would be best. Maybe you say too little, maybe he is imagining a worse catastrophe, a terminal illness, an asteroid approaching the Earth. Maybe, like every child before him, he already knows what’s wrong and is simply waiting for you to say it. There are words for this moment—an exact right kind and number—but if you begin to speak, you will never stop. Instead, trace your fingers over the edge of a tile, feeling its corner, sharp enough to cut, and do the best you can.

Say to your son, “Look. I did it.”

Say, “I did it all by myself.”

Let him think that you think that you did an amazing job.

Read more from Issue 16.2.