I have been busy renovating a house I recently bought. One of my biggest challenges has been coming up with bathroom surfaces that are impermeable and impervious to water and stains. Porcelain and ceramic tiles are a good start, but traditional tile grout absorbs water. Sealers can temporarily prevent that, but eventually grout lines are going to form a breeding ground for mold and mildew. My goal with all my construction is zero maintenance, maximum durability, and minimal effort to keep things clean.<\/p>\n
For bathroom walls acrylic solid-surfaces are a good solution. The cheapest I could find are Swanstone and U.S. Marble, but those are still at least $20\/sq.ft.<\/p>\n
I was getting ready to go with vinyl for the floors when I started hearing mention of epoxy grouts, which are truly impermeable and never need sealing. Combining that with the $.77 square-foot porcelain tiles Home Depot was selling sounded like a winning combination. It took some research but here’s what I found:<\/p>\n
Laticrete makes a patented epoxy grout called SpectraLOCK, which consists of a two-part epoxy cement (“Parts A and B”) and a third “Part C” sanded filler. Lowes is apparently the only retailer that carries SpectraLOCK, and they only stock the smallest “Mini” containers. A Mini is good for about 25 sq.ft. of tile but costs $23. For anything bigger it is better to go online and buy “Full” A-B units, which are equal to four Minis. The epoxy is the expensive part but it’s very light. StoneTooling.com<\/a> delivers Full A-B units for $50. You can then go to Lowes and get 4 Part C containers in whatever color you want for $12.<\/p>\n Laticrete sells “Commercial” units of SpectrLOCK which are equal to 4 Full units. StoneTooling.com delivers Commercial A-B units for $150. Lowes doesn’t usually stock the 16 Part C containers you would need in a single color, so at that point you would either have to special order or pay to ship them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been busy renovating a house I recently bought. One of my biggest challenges has been coming up with bathroom surfaces that are impermeable and impervious to water and stains. Porcelain and ceramic tiles are a good start, but traditional tile grout absorbs water. Sealers can temporarily prevent that, but eventually grout lines are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[100,99,98],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools","tag-epoxy-grout","tag-laticrete","tag-spectralock"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po3d1-7O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1688,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/1688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/Interests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}