# any advice



## Kyras (Jan 2, 2010)

Without mudding the floor, it is a pickle. 1/2" deviation is horrible.

1) Thinset in the pathetically low areas with a LONG trowel. Set with a huge notch trowel 3/4" for mexican tile. I custom made mine out of an enormous trowel from Home Depot. It's at least 18" long. This enables you to flatten the floor more easily than a smaller trowel that just rides the waves up and down. Backbutter the tiles using a V-notch trowel to give more cushion and ensure a good bond. This will make an incredibly strong floor. It will also use huge amounts of thinset, at least 3 times what you expect (use latex thinset). This is a difficult approach and will entail reaching back into the tile you have set to pop up and reset low pieces. Huge amounts of ooze between tiles to scrape out the next day while it's still fresh in the morning. I have set 3000 sq ft 18" travertine floor like this on wavy crap and it turned out perfect and unreal strong, but it was far from easy and required a real touch. And it was not on a pitch...

2) Build a dam, somehow, around the drain about 2 feet away from it like a box. Pour self leveler and make most of the floor flat. Remove dam, use thinset and a long flat trowel and level to create the pitch from the leveler to the drain. Now the only problem is running 12x12 on that pitched area. Cut it to 6x6 in that area, or 4x4. That's a far easier method and more likely to give a good product.

3) Use a straightedge from the drain to find the high spots in the floor. Ride from high to high, viewing the gap below. Use a pencil, circle the low areas that need filling as you move the straightedge around the floor. Now fill the low spots and let dry overnight. Repeat at least one more time. That works very well on a flat surface. The pitch makes it tougher. The end result is mediocre. Set with trowels described in 1).

Yeah, that isn't the recommended use for thinset. In my experience it will perform extremely well, however, despite being very difficult to screed off a sticky icky mess and achieve something approaching flat. It will dry hard as hell. Coloring outside the lines? You betcha. But the job doesn't conform to any known specs, it's a clusterfck.

I don't use self leveler, really, but you must stay within its guidelines for thickness or it will self destruct (it has a history of that, so I don't use it). A combo of the different approaches would seem the best (filling the deepest area with thinset, apply self leveler)


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