Becasue I have a couple of questions!

Room is 3m x 6m but has kitchen untis in, to the area to be tiled is about 13m3

I’m guessing just one day’s work for a pro? Roughly how much d’ya reckon for the labour?

And those nice glossy polished ties, do they stay shiny and are they a swine to keep clean and shiny?

We’ll be looking at probably a dark grey/black colour, BTW

Thanks in advance 🙂

EDIT
Oh, if there’s any tilers near Fanborough, Hants, you can give me a quote if you like. Serious! 🙂

those nice glossy polished ties

if you ever walk around the house in sealskins socks you’ll be able to practice ice skating in the kitchen.

Like black cars, dark, shiney colours will show every watermark and scratch. You can keep them looking good but it takes effort.

I thought as much. 😕

Have you looked at Karndean (Sp?) and similar – I was really impressed with the stuff we had at our old house – very hardwearing and ‘not like lino’.

I think we’ve decided on tiles… 🙂

I think I’ve got a similar size to tile, and we’ve been quoted just over £500 supply & fit. We’re going for the glossy tiles, it is wet shoes that are the killer 😈 but not too bad to keep clean IMHO with a decent floor cleaner.

Wishfull thinking there PP. more like two days.
one day to fit the tiles and the next to grout them.
and that is assuming no subfloor prep required

I just got a shower room done and the cost of the tiliing was about £22/m2 floor and walls (labour only). I can check the quote when I get home tonight. My floor was much smaller and it less than a day to lay the floor tiles with the grouting was done the next day. The major cost was in the tiles not the labour.

They are a bit on the cold side though first thing in the morning.

[edit] just read what trout said and this time didn’t include the floor prep. The whole shower room start to finish took 7 working days. Did a good job though.

You’re looking at two days for that area. You’ll find tilers will quote in different ways, for the job, per m2, per hour etc. Just make sure to get a few quotes and be wary of people quoting ridiculously cheap prices.

If you’ve got a Tile Giant or Topps near you, pop in there they’ll have a few trusted local tilers cards under the counter.

As for streaky marks, you can get specialist tile cleaners that’ll protect from that sort of thing.

Tom

The tiles you’re looking at are porcalain. They’re practically indestructable and don’t scratch very easily at all.
Realistically, it’s gonna cost around 400 quid to get a decent job and you won’t get a good tiler in before xmas now either. Budget around £25m2 for tiles, adhesive, grout, SLC etc. It’s also considering underfloor heating while you’re doing it. Will probably be around 200 quid for a good kit

Tom, we usually do use Topps Tiles, I’ll nip in on my way home I think. Good idea.

Floor is stripped back to concrete but has the old glue on for the 1950s ties we removed, but I can’t see that being a problem.

Monkey, we’ve decided against underfloor heating and all the electrics are in, done an dusted, anyway.

I’m still umming and ahhing about doing it myself, truth be told…..

Monkey – If you can get 13m2 of underfloor heating for £200, please let me know where!

I think we paid more than that for 3m2 in the bathroom, to be fair!

wwaswas – that was my view as to effort, showing watersplashes etc – also if you saw PP slide past the door when I polished all the doors during a spring clean and got polish on the floor. Going for tiles mainly because it is a kitchen / dining room and we have a patio door out to the garden and we get to look after a springer spaniel for most of the winter… every year! We have underfloor heating in the bathroom and it is a pain in the arse – every time we get a power cut we have to set everything again

Yeah, but nice warm feet in the bathroom after I came in from my ride last night though 8)!

Peter
I tiled similar area in my kitchen along with utility room and loo when we had extension done
Ok Ive done a bit of tiling before – kitchen floor, bathroom walls and floor and the new bathroom walls in extension
Took me 3/4 day to do tiling, but that included lots of cuts around doors etc in the utility room, downstairs loo
Kitchen only was straight forward, minimal cutting of tiles took only about 3-4 hours
Im by no means an expert but I would like to think Im reasonably competent, it was also a perfectly flat clean new floor and a simple rectangle shape that happened to be almost a perfect multiple of 30cm
Grouting then took me another couple of hours, but I left that over a year between tiling and grouting (it was a long bike ride in between!)
So all in all I would say its a full days work but needs to be spread between a couple of days just because of tiling and grouting

Maybe if you dont fancy risking messing it up, buying a decent tile cutter etc you could get someone in to tile, then do the grouting yourself
may also be cheaper if you provide materials, although our plumbers when we did extension let us use their trade discount at the tile place and it was about 40%, so a tiler may be able to get the tiles cheaper for you

Iain, that’s good to hear actually. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all trades really, and I’d have to get a decent tile cutter, but I’m just not (yet!) 100% confident that I could do a job up to the standard I want – i.e. VERY NEAT.

The floor isn’t 100% flat, there’s the odd bit that might need a few mm filling here and there

I’m torn: Half of me thinks “How hard can it be” and “I can save a lot of money here” whilst the other half says “I hate tiling” and “I wnt it to look really good”

????

The money you save doing it yourself could go on things you don’t need for you bike…..

I’m always keen to save money & DIY but if you are putting very straight high gloss tiles on a less than perfect surface think long & hard before having a go yourself. Even small irregularities will show up in the reflections on the tiles.

Tight as I am I’d seriously think about getting someone with a good reputation to do it for me (no point paying if they can’t do a better job than I can)

Peter, if you find anyone good let us know – I am waiting on Dave2.9 to get back to me with details of one of his mates who is a tiler. Tile shopping this weekend, luckily sort of owed a favour from a local tile supplier, so hopefully something decent at a bargain price!

In our old house I got somebody in to do the kitchen floor, we were using expensive tiles and they were being laid at 45 degrees, the kitchen floor ran into a built in larder, which meant lots of awkward cuts. The guy we used, sub-contracted by the tile shop in Aldershot, did a very good job and got ever cut right first time. My view was if I managed to cut several tiles badly, I was wasting money on tiles, when it is better spent on a pro to the job. The only problem was his floor tiling put my wall tiling to shame… Annoyingly I didn’t keep the guys details.

In our conservatory we had a flat concrete floor, which I laid some bargain floor tiles from Homebase on. TBH they looked ok, but not up the quality of the professionally laid kitchen floor.

no experience of floor but did wall tiles myself, on a reasonably uneven bathroom wall. As above, if you have a flat / mirror finish then you have to get them all straight or the reflections will be all to cock, but I used bumpy whites and they cover up the imperfections. Suspect slatey type tiles on the floor would do the same.

Cheers fells, some decent advice

R_B and Jason, you are thinking the same as me. I can do it, but will it look good, or just OK? And with the amount if money we’re spending I want it to look spot on 🙂

I’ve just rung a couple if tilers. One was busy for the rest of this year but the other is coming round tonight to have a look. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know what happens Jason 🙂

13m2 if on a pretty flat floor without to many complications should be a 2 day job fixed and grouted. I charge £30pm2 for Porcelain inc. adhesive and grouts. Ceramics I charge £22.50 pm2.

Beware not all Porcelain is the same, Polished stuff is a bit of a mare sometimes, it does scratch contrary to popular belief, It also requires sealing as it’s porous. sometimes it has a layer of packing wax on it too, this can be a git as it needs removing with a propriety cleaner 1st, then needs sealing afterwards. This is all chargeable on top of standard rates.

If the adhesive left from the old marley tiles is Bitumen based then it will complicate things slightly as cement based adhesives won’t stick to bitumen. I would always ‘seal’ the bitumen with a thin scrape of self leveling compound 1st just to make sure.

Approx £400 would be a good estimate for your job without seeing it.

Oh, and I wouldn’t use Topps tiles if they were the last place on earth.

Blazin good to see a tiler who knows what he’s on about. I work in the tile industry and can’t recall the amount of times I’ve had to tell tilers ‘who’ve been tiling for 20 years’ about sealing porcelain (even some manufacturers recommend sealing some of their matt porcelain).

good point made there, with high gloss tiles Im not sure I would do it myself
I did quarry type tiles so less regular and any imperfections are better hidden by the tile
The first time I tiled the floor was irregular, I levelled it as best we could with self levelling screed but it was still not perfect, I always knew where the three dodgy tiles where and although no one else could see them, I was glad when we replaced it all with an extension and I had a chance to try again!

I say get a man in, but see if grouting yourself makes it any cheaper.
Neat grout lines finish the job off but all that is needed is a little patience and a steady hand

(oh and sorry but not prepared to throw my tile cutter in the post with those tools, that really would push the postage up ;))

I laid both our kitchen floor and bathroom floor without any previous experience, though I did a lot of research befroehand and am fairly practical on the DIY front.

The kitchen floor was a piece of cake, using 300 x 300 ceramic tiles. The bathroom, using 600 x 600 porcelain tiles, was an absolute nightmare, and hand me cursing for weeks, though the final finish on both jobs is pretty much perfect.

The difference is that porcelain tiles (especially the 10mm thick floor ones) require a dedicated wet disc cutter, you can’t just score and snap them like ceramics as they are hard as nails. Also, bear in mind that using black or dark grout (which I presume you’d want to with black tiles) gets absolutely everywhere, though at least will be easier to clean/polish off high gloss tiles (which mine weren’t…)

I think any gloss black tiles eventually dull as they are slowly covered in a fine network of scratches from everyday use, just like the cobweb style swirl marks on a never-polished black car.

I know absolutely nothing about Tiles, but I do know about a night on them! 🙂

Porcelain tiles also lend themselves to very tight grout joints, I’m talking 2-3mm on 450-600mm tiles so there is no margin for setting out errors. Prior planning is critical, likewise a pretty flat floor is desirable.

I just finished a 50m2 black polished porcelain floor in 600mmx600mm tiles with charcoal grout, took me 8 days and the floor was so un flat to start with that nearly £500 worth of leveling products and adhesive were used. I meant to take a photo when I was done but forgot. It looked mega but don’t think it will for all that long, wouldn’t be my choice of floor material.

If using a dark grout, make sure the tiles are sealed before grouting as the colour from the grout can leach into the micro pores of the tile.

Good grouting can make average tiling look acceptable, bad grouting can make even the best tiling look lousy.