Help for a lowly DIY guy!

[JBaggs92]

Hi everyone, my wife and I are getting our home ready for sale and part of it has required me to rip up old tile and lay new, unbroken tiles in its place. I've done my fair share of tiling and am pretty confident in my ability to lay it properly. My problem comes in the form of water.

I removed our water heater to get to the floor underneath it. I put 5 courses of 6x24 inch tile using acrylpro adhesive. Thinking it would be alright, my wife started the shower to clean off, and I wasn't thinking that the open outlet pipe would become a torrent of cold water when she started the shower. The tile had been laid about 5 hours prior and was, well, showered with probably a half gallon of water before I could run upstairs and tell her to shut the water off.

My question is, because I couldn't dry the water in the open grout lines, is my tile job ruined? I know for a fact the adhesive wasn't even close to being set yet, just a dry skin over what was exposed. Will the water dissipate given time or am I in for a few hours of removal, scraping, and re-laying of tile? Thanks in advance!

James

[navyson]

Remove, scrape, and re-install using thin-set mortar. AcrylPro Mastic will probably re-emulsify from what little time it had to cure. In addition, the weight of the hot water heater on the floor set with mastic would probably not be optimal.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

With Acryl-pro, I don't know if that floor would be ready to walk on in 5 days, let alone 5 hours.

Do what Donald said. Scrape it up (which should go fairly easily) and use a real modified mortar to install them. Wait at least overnight to grout them.

You have to schedule things so that you keep traffic off of the floor for a couple of days while your work on it.

[Kman]

Or use a rapid-set mortar that you can grout in a couple of hours. You'll still need to wait a couple of days before reinstalling the water heater.

[JBaggs92]

Thank you all so much for the advice. It was quite a frustrating experience as it is the last major area of work. We're putting in bead board and need the tile set up before walking around in there. I did end up pulling it all up, scraping, and re-laying it. Good news, though, I had great coverage! When I first started tilingi would often get air pockets and I'm glad I have grown since then.

Also, Mr DIY Tile Guy, you have some fantastic videos on YouTube and have earned yourself another subscriber. I love the fact that there are forums like this that bring together some of the very best skills to educate and encourage people like me who want to do the work ourselves.

Thanks again, y'all. I know where to go now if I have questions on the future.