Timeless Design with Penny Tile
Back when most of the historic row homes here in Washington DC were first built, they often used penny tile at wet locations like bathrooms and entry foyers. Most of the interiors of the historical homes were sheathed and finished with broadleaf or heart pine or also known as broad loom pine wood floors. At the time this wood was relatively abundant and sometimes, even installed underneath the tile locations. This wood would also be used as a subflooring.
Essentially, as soon as the rough framing of the house was completed the walls and ceilings which also in most cases doubled as a floor frame systems, the builders of the historic times back then would go ahead and sheath the joists with the wood flooring. In some rare cases, particularly for roofing membranes 1x wood pine materials would be used as a sheathing but installed diagonal instead of perpendicular to the roof rafters. When the wood flooring is installed without a subflooring, it would often be installed just perpendicular to the run of the joists.
Joists normally run from side to side at most floor systems and in this case, the wood flooring would run from front to back.
The picture below shows a penny tile floor system. This particular penny tile happens to be modern or contemporary and set with a dark grout. Dark grouts were a little bit uncommon back in historic times. Although it’s a personal opinion, many people today think the darker grout looks much better. Here, the glossy sheen at the glaze of the ceramic penny tile stands out against the matte finish grout. The contrast makes the round penny tiles looks brighter and prominent, particularly with the angle of the light.
The next picture below shows the tile at a direct angle, almost in a two-dimensional view. Like many different types of tile work, this tile is similar to a contemporary mosaic and will generally be manufactured with a textile backing that holds the tile in its patterned layout. When the tile is set into a bed of mortar, the sheet of grouped tiles are set as one.
Even though it sounds much easier to have a textile backing which holds the tiles in their individual positions, it can also be very difficult to set a mosaic or penny tile type flooring tile or wall tile evenly. To set the tile properly, generally a rubber float is used to press the tile into a mortar bed.
In historic times it was common for tile to be set into a thick-set mortar which was very similar to the type of mortar we use for cementitious block installation today. Often lime would have been added to the mortar which had a tendency to make the mortar a little bit stickier which makes installation easier and also reduce the weight of the mortar, slightly. Thickset mortar though, by comparison to the thinset mortar used so commonly today, is extremely heavy. In most cases, we would find these type of tile installations in hallway bathrooms and less frequently in historic kitchens.
If you look closely at the grout, set between the tiles, you can see that this is likely a sanded grout. Sanded grouts are often used for thicker joints between tiles. In this particular case, the mortar joints are very thick because the radius shape of the individual tile pieces has mortar joints that change in width as the grout rounds around each individual penny tile.
In most rectilinear type of tile installations, the thickness of mortar joints can be very close to consistent. An 1/8-inch joint, for example, might stay close to 1/8 of an inch, throughout the installation. In cases like that, where it’s rectilinear tile, the majority of deviations in grout line thickness, the current areas where tiles are often set unevenly. Sometimes uneven tile installation is a direct result of improper subflooring installation. An undulating or uneven type of subflooring condition will require grout lines to either be larger to accommodate the variation, or grout lines may look very inconsistent.
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