Best way to use pebble border tiles ?

[picbits]

swmbo has settled on some nice medium format ceramic tiles (250 x 400mm) but has also decided she wants a pebble effect border 2/3rd up the wall. We've got some sample and the tiles are around 6mm thick with the pebbles being a fairly uniform 3-4mm thick mounted on a plastic grid material similar to mosaic.

The pebble tiles are around 300mm x 70mm.

As I see it, I have two options, tile up to where the pebble tiles will be with the normal large tiles, try and guess the height of the pebble tiles and get them reasonably level (with around 10mm of adhesive behind them) and then continue tiling upwards. Its a couple of tiles above the border so nothing too major.

The other option is to cut some MDF to the 70mm (or slightly more), tile up to the border, baton with MDF, continue tiling above then remove MDF baton and infill with the pebble effect using the tiles above and below to gauge the level of the pebbles.

I'll be mainly tiling onto cement boards with the odd bit of sealed plasterboard using Keraflex Maxi.

There will only be around 3 linear meters of pebble border. I'm not 100% happy with using it in a wet environment like a shower but I was scowled at when I suggest it may not be a good idea so it's going in !

Ta
Dom

 

[tilerman]

Hi, I recently tiled some big pub walls with pebbles that were more like boulders than pebbles. Knock your adhesive up stiff and use rapid because they will slide around a bit and you may need to keep pushing them into position until the adhesive starts setting. Like the idea with the baton, that's what I would do if I was using the pebbles as a border. Get your spacing right though as the pebble border wont have a straight edge. Lay the border out on the floor and find the point where the border is the widest and that is the gap you need to leave between the tiles.

 

[picbits]

Thanks for the answer - I've talked her out of it now as I'm not too happy with them being in a wet environment with lots of grout etc. She's ordered some "proper" border tile samples so that solves my issue