gahrajmahal
Well-known member
We have a small eat in kitchen as I am sure some of you do too. It has great cathedral ceilings and lots of windows. Still, it has worked great with one exception. The chairs bang on the walls despite all in the family being careful not to.
Chair rail is the usual fix for this problem but I never wanted to mess up the clean lines of a smooth wall. Finally I had the idea!!
I quickly sketched up the concept and up it went onto the fridge as a reminder. Well time passes quickly, or I am lazy I don't know which. So, yea, a year or so goes by and my wife asks, are you ever going to do your idea to keep the chairs off the walls? So here it is. The idea is to create a ledge on the floor so that the legs of the chairs will hit that before reaching the wall. Brilliant, I know. For it to be as unobtrusive as I want it to be it has to blend in with the original floor. So, after making the wooden ledge I have to glue ceramic tile onto it and grout it to match.
Using 3/4 Birch plywood I figure out the correct width.
Check it with a chair for clearance.
Cut both boards to length.
For strength in the corner use a paint stick as a full length spline.
You got to buy one of these dangerous bits for your router, or at least I did. I rounded over the front edge of the boards prior to gluing it up so I had to fix the adjoining board with this reverse roundover.
Don't do this. Glue the square edges up with the spline first, then round over the front edge with your router.
After the glue dried I thought I should paint the front edge with grey to match the grout. Don't do this either. It was a waste of time as I had to touch it up after gluing the tile and grouting between the tiles.
I really dislike cutting tiles but I got out my cheap ($100) wet tile saw I have had for like 10 years. It works great and has a 4" diamond blade. I have cut a bunch of tile with that thing. I quess I dislike that it gets you wet, the work table wet and a big puddle on the floor. When you are finished you have to wash it out as all the slurry ends up in the tray under the blade.
I used contact tile cement with a plastic 1/8 saw edge applicator. I applied the glue to the plywood ledge and also to the back of the tile. This adhesive will dry and be a little flexible. Important since the whole thing just sits on the floor. It is not attached in any way.
I grout the tiles using ready mix gray grout and a rubber squeegie from my auto body tools. My tile float is on loan and is too big for this little space.
After letting it set up for 15 minutes or so I wipe the joint with a sponge and water. Later I switch over to a Scotch Bright pad as the grout has dried hard on the surface causing my sponge to disentegrate when rubbing hard.
See where the gray paint has rubbed off while cleaning up the grout?
It blends in quite nicely.
Job complete! If you go back to the very first photo you can see the ledge was in the photo. Did you pick up on that?
Now to repair the walls for the last time and repaint. Maybe next year, ha, ha.
