How to Mix Mortar for a Tile Countertop

Video Transcript

"I’m Lee; I have a degree in architecture, about ten years experience in the construction field, and today we’re installing a designer countertop. Now we want the mortar on a countertop to be mixed thicker than on a floor. On a floor, you want each individual tile- you wan the tile to sit down in the mortar as much as possible. On a countertop, you really- you want it to stay in place. You can push down into the mortar, but you want it to stay in place and you don’t want them to shift because we have so many small cuts. They’ll shift really easily.

What you do is just pick- we’re using a gray mortar, just because we have black grout. Scoop you some in. don’t breathe in all this dust. It has silica in it, and I’m sure there is a warning on the side of the bag. And add a little bit of water; you can use anything to stir it with. You can even use a big serving spoon- it doesn’t matter. If you’re going to do a lot of it, I would never do any more than you could use in twenty minutes, because then it’s going to start to get thicker and you’re going to get little chunks that are going to just cause all kinds of problems. Now if you mix it too thin, that’s fine- add some more mortar to it. Want to make sure that you get all the lumps out.

They do sell an attachment for your drill that will make this a lot easier, but since we’re doing such a small area, we’ll do it by hand. And just keep adding in…I would say about that much more. You just want it about that thick, to where it will hold onto your stirring apparatus and it won’t just fall off. That way it will hold up the tile. And each one doesn’t have to be exactly the same, but try to get it close to the same so that the tiles won’t slide. And that’s how you’d fix the mortar for you designer countertop."