You know from the earlier project log that this project took twice as along and cost four times as much as I imagined. I don't feel too back about this, considering that I had no experience with tiling before.

One of the things I considered but rejected was a pre-made tub surround made of acrylic or similar material that looks like tile. I thought that was too expensive to risk in case it didn't go well. When I got done with the demolition down to the bare studs, it probably would have been pretty simple to use one of those, and there would have been little risk. The overall cost would have been lower. I still don't know how it would look, but it would probably look OK. I probably wouldn't have the two niches, and the tile pattern would be uniform on all three walls. I could not have reasonably gone all the way up to the ceiling with the pre-made surround.

I see lots of little flaws and mistakes in my work, but I expected that. If I don't look too closely, I'm happy with the outcome. It's also one of those deals where I got better as things progressed. If I ever do another tile job, it will probably have fewer rough edges. In fact, by the time I got to the third wall, it went pretty well.

Probably the biggest mistake I made was my practice of doing just a bit of the work at a time. Especially on the back wall, by only doing a row or two each day, the tops of the tiles didn't have anything to keep them pressed flat against the wall. While the overall wall is pretty flat, it leans out a bit as it goes up. It's definitely not plumb. That impacted the details on the two side walls.

The advice I got several times, from videos and from people with tiling experience, was to be sure that everything was level, flat, and plumb before starting the tiling. I listened to that advice, but with a "yeah, that's pretty close" attitude. I could probably have saved myself some finagling if I had worked at little harder at that aspect of things at the beginning.

I had a staging area in a nearby bedroom for tools and supplies, but I didn't have a nearby area where I could make a mess with my power tools (miter saw, angle grinder, wet tile saw). Instead, those things had to be in my unfinished basement. I don't know how many trips I made up and down those two sets of stairs, but on some days it really wore me out. Lugging bags of thinset mix or stacks of large format tiles was a pain in the neck.

Would I do it again? Well, I wouldn't want to repeat this much effort and achieve exactly the same results. On the other hand, I'm more experienced now, so I think the effort would be less and the results better. It definitely scratched my itch of wanting to do a tile project. There is no natural "next tile project" in this house, except maybe kitchen backsplashes. I'll have to think about it.