Cutting Tile In Circles

One of our past projects was to lay tile in the den. This area is nearly 625 square feet and included what was originally the patio to the house. When we acquired it, the original brick from the back of the house was still showing and the iron railings from the patio were still in place. This, along with horrible avocado green '70s shag carpet layed directly on concrete and stinking.

We yanked out all of the carpeting (the trash people in our neighborhood have learned to dread coming here...) and cut off the iron railings (they had the new cement pad poured around them) and scraped up glue and carpet pad remnants.

The little bride found some tile she really liked and we hauled home 2500 pounds of it as well as 400 pounds of dry adhesive and 80 pounds of dry grout. We spent a couple of weeks working nights laying the tile.

Now, the fireplace has a hearth pad that is a semicircle of bricks. I got to tell you, I lost sleep over how I was going to deal with that. All kinds of suggestions were posited including smashing up tiles and laying the pieces in the non-square area.

One Saturday morning while the bride wasn't here to make fun of me, I got out my Ryobi angle grinder and attached a four inch tile blade. I made paper templates and started cutting and laying out tiles. It took a few passes, and since I didn't mark top and bottom on my templates, I cut one tile backwards. But all in all, I am pretty proud of the results: