Getting fed up of tradesmen letting me down or coming back with daft prices, so thinking of having a go myself. New kitchen floor, about 20sq.m. The floor is currently 25mm STS concrete board and is pretty much bang on flat and level. It has underfloor heating under it, so I need to figure out if I need an anti-crack membrane. Tiles will be 600mm square. I have tiled a fireplace before and it looks ok. I’ve heard there are some gadgets to help lift the tiles at the corners and get them level? Any other tips?
Cheers!

I think you’re about to find out why tradespeople charge ‘daft’ prices! a 20m2 floor would be approx £800-£1000 plus floor prep. I’ve got about £3000’s worth of kit on the go when I’m tiling floors (oh, and 25 years practice)

Seriously though, it’s not that hard if you follow processes methodically, have an eye for detail and have access to all the tools
required, oh, and plenty of time.

You don’t need an anti fracture mat, you need a decoupling membrane. Also if you decide to embark on it, take time to learn what adhesives and grouts are suitable for your needs. Levelling clips can only help level tiles, they don’t do the job for you. You still need to ensure a full and level bed of adhesive is laid and that the tile is back buttered for full adhesion.

Thanks. I’d be pretty happy with £800! In fact I’d be moderately happy if anyone would actually turn up to quote when they say they will. I guess business is still good at the moment. You’re not in Sheffield are you?!

Thanks. I’d be pretty happy with £800! In fact I’d be moderately happy if anyone would actually turn up to quote when they say they will. I guess business is still good at the moment. You’re not in Sheffield are you?!

Yes, there’s lots of bandits around at the moment. I’m in Leicestershire with a full calendar until February at the moment. I’m not even looking at new jobs without being upfront with people to manage expectations.

If you’re going to do it, look at a few YouTube videos, TileCoach is decent if American ideas, I’m sure they’re others.

I think it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done! I did 35m^2 in 300 x 300mm riven slate (about 400 tiles). My big mistake was to buy ‘bargain’ tiles that turned out to be random thicknesses. Each tile needed a different thickness bed. I was doing it in the evening after work. Some nights I only got 8 tiles laid.

Then there was the grouting (which wasn’t so bad), but the cleanup! Scrubbing every slate to get the grout out of the textured face took forever.

Uniform thickness, smooth tiles should be a lot easier.

Absolutely buggers your knees – get some decent knee pads.

£3ks worth of tools, the notched trowel you use made from Titanium with a sparkly diamond encrusted ferrule
My hand tools could probably be replaced for £100 + a mixer/Stihl saw and almost forgot a few levels and my £700 laser
Ok I admit I was being facetious

Very hard work
Planning is essential to work out the best layouts for cuts.
Good cutting tools also important- I hired a massive tile cutter for the weekend . Calibrated tiles and a level floor is also important as is working out the best grout width for the tiles.
I found out that even porcelain tiles are not 100% square and exactly the same size.
It’s only a small tolerance but can be important if you want narrow joints.
You only get one shot at the title when laying the tiles.
As has been said before the leveller/spacers are good but only work with a proper bed and a level subfloor.
That’s why there is a shortage of tilers . Grouting can also be a pain if not experienced – clen too soon and the grout gets dragged with the sponge , too late and it’s a bigger to clean.

I didn’t find it particularly hard. I used a tile levelling system I had large format tiles and used 10 per tile. probably overkill but floor is perfect.

pain in the ass was when you break off the clips a few of them didn’t snap cleanly so you have to remove a small amount of plastic before grouting

hardest part of the job for me was grout cleanup. Next time I tile I will be much much cleaner.

tools wise I have a big clinker (brilliant) a cheap tile saw which I try not to use as really noisey a fret saw type thing, file and nibblers. some sort of specialist bucket and float from rubi which worked well.

personally I found it quite enjoyable and easy to do. in fact with the latest extension it’s one thing I am definitely going to do myself

drilling holes for wall hung radiators is a pain if you have to do it. I created a template out of ply abs clamped it to the tile and it took ages. now I have a new pillar drill I’d hope I could use that to make it less strain on the wrists

Go on, give us a laff. How much?

Aside from all that above, the most important thing is the layout. EG I think twit like me would start with whole tiles from one wall end/side and tile across the room only to discover the start wall is on the piss and the tile lines are at an angle to the flow of the room and it looks stupid and everyone comments on it reminding you how shit you are. Plus the other wall ends up with cut tiles rather than full tiles and it looks odd.
A smart tiler may well start in the middle of the room from a carefully planned and measured line, so all sides end with a 1/4 cut (for example, it might be 1/2, 1/3 whatever.)
You may not even start in the middle as the layout of your space may demand a different start point, but have a good think about it before you start.

Any other tips?

Put vinyl flooring down instead.

Put vinyl flooring down instead

+1

£3ks worth of tools, the notched trowel you use made from Titanium with a sparkly diamond encrusted ferrule

No platinum blade and iced out handle here, just fairly standard professional tiling kit. Sure, you don’t NEED this level of kit to lay a basic floor and I started my apprenticeship in 1997 with no power tools
and learnt the hard way! My point was really that people often complain about ripoff trades without considering the investment required in tools and time based learning.

Dewalt DE36000 cutter £1250
Rubi 1250max cutter £600
3 grinders with different diamond blades
Diamond polishing stone
Trowels
Mixer and paddle
Laser levels/square
Straight edges and levels
Wash boy
Respirator
Buckets, sponges
Grout floats

I tiled our kitchen, back hall, utility room and toilet, and it was one design of tile joining all the areas together so lots of doorways and turns to negotiate. Was far easier than I thought and I had no special tools or experience.

Granted we had just built the house so I was tiling on top of a perfectly flat concrete floor, but I just used a spirit level and the wee plastic tile dividers and it was all grand. I think the choice of tile you end up using can expose, or hide, your flaws. Ours was definitely the latter.

I think it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done! I did 35m^2 in 300 x 300mm riven slate (about 400 tiles). My big mistake was to buy ‘bargain’ tiles that turned out to be random thicknesses. Each tile needed a different thickness bed. I was doing it in the evening after work. Some nights I only got 8 tiles laid.

Then there was the grouting (which wasn’t so bad), but the cleanup! Scrubbing every slate to get the grout out of the textured face took forever.

To be fair non calibrated slate is pretty hard, but much easier if you plan well. I did 1000’s of m2 of it as an apprentice.

We started by grading it all into thicknesses – thin, medium and thick. You start laying with the thick ones as it’s easier to bed a thin tile up to meet a thick one! Also, the thin tiles are then left for cuts. We laid them out, swept the dust off the faces, then sealed them before laying, this helps when grouting later as the grout then doesn’t stick to the face. But it was a tough old job.

It’s not that difficult to put tiles down and grout, the difficult bit is getting it to be perfect and how bothered are you if it’s not quite perfect. A level floor helps, would not recommend tiling a floor that has 2 slightly different floor heights (2 rooms merged into 1). Also take care to line up the tiles so over the length of the room the straight lines are still straight and don’t have a slight curve to them

Put vinyl flooring down instead.

+2

I’ve just taken up a tiled floor and replaced with vinyl; it took hours of horrible dusty hard work to clear the floor up and next to no time to put the new one down, and it looks pretty perfect even though I’ve never done it before. And if we want to change it in future it’ll be really easy to replace too.

I have tiled a fireplace before and it looks ok.

If you’re happy with OK, crack on. Depends how ‘bang on’ your levels are though.

I’m currently, mid-heawave, scraping my spare-room floor to remove old vinyl adhesive that’s bonded to the bloody boards. I wish I could get it flat enough to lay the bloody flooring, sweating buckets and having a lovely time, or not. Wish I’d paid someone to do this now!

I also had a go, 55sqm of 400×600 riven slate in a cottage with wonky walls. I had to level the floor too, the end result was good but took me a while.

Tips I can offer as an amateur are, I used slow setting adhesive, gave me the oportunity to fix cock ups. Trades will use the faster setting stuff as they are more confident/skilled and so that they can walk on it sooner, not an issue when your working on your own and in your own time.

With riven slate (or any other stone I guess) it is possible to fix an occaisional bit of lipping with a belt sander if you have to, obviously it’s a bodge but no one but me notices where I’ve done it!

Also lithofin slate sealer gives a great finish

You start laying with the thick ones as it’s easier to bed a thin tile up to meet a thick one! Also, the thin tiles are then left for cuts. We laid them out, swept the dust off the faces, then sealed them before laying, this helps when grouting later as the grout then doesn’t stick to the face.

I’d figured out the first bit, but not the second 🙂

It still looks good (frighteningly) 17 years later, but it could do with being stripped & re-sealed now. (Still on it’s original Lithofin, but it’s started to wear through where chairs / feet scuff under the table.)

Wish I’d paid someone to do this now!

I tried to pay for someone to do mine; either they didn’t quote at all, or quoted but went quiet afterwards. I guess pretty much all tradespeople are busy enough that don’t need to take on horrible jobs like taking up old floors and things. Which is no good if you find yourself with such a job that needs doing…

Tiles will be 600mm square.

When we did ours everything I read suggested that that was too large for underfloor heating and risked cracking so we went down to 400.  I’m willing to listen to whatever blazin-saddlrs says on it though.

I’ve done a couple of halls.

They both took ages.

For the first one there is one tile that went round a door frame and radiator pipe. That one tile took 2h. As in craft, cut, cut snap, sigh, cut, cut,cut snap, grrrrrrr….

They both have one tile with a slightly raised corner that irritates me no end and no one else notices.

The second hall has an extra 0.5cm of grout round the tricky edges. This saved an incredible amount of time. No one else has ever noticed/ mentioned it.

4 and 5 years on they both look the same

When we did ours everything I read suggested that that was too large for underfloor heating and risked cracking so we went down to 400. I’m willing to listen to whatever blazin-saddlrs says on it though.

No limit to tiles sizes on UFH as long as you use a decouple membrane like Dural or Ditramat (which I’d do either way tbh). You should have a movement joint every 5m really, you can achieve this by using silicone instead of grout for a joint at the correct location if you don’t like proper movement trims. Try to incorporate movement joints at edges or doorways where possible.

We’ve just had our kitchen tiled, 450mm floor tiles (15 sq m) and metro tiles on wall (about 10ish sq m). All in, including tiles, levelling compound and finishing strips etc was £1070. No way I could have done it a fraction as good, it looks perfect.

To me tiling is the one job i will not do. Even pros do it badly sometimes and for an amateur to get even to acceptable is very rare.

My bathroom was complex to do the walls. One tile is less than 1mm out. The rest are bob on. No little slivers. No odd cuts. No way could i have done that good a job. Just the setting out took the pro best part of a day

have an eye for detail and have access to all the tools
required, oh, and plenty of time.

I might be wrong but I think Mowgli might have built a cedar strip kayak which is pretty much the definition of the above skills!

I guess you’re not tiling under the cupboards as they are in already? If you have any integrated appliances save some tiles to cover the area under them. This is just in case you ever replace the integrated unit with a freestanding one. Store the spares under the base units, behind the plinth.

have an eye for detail

My dad did their kitchen floor. You could see the point at which I stopped helping him line the tiles up 😁 all went a bit freestyle after that. It’s been redone since thankfully. I couldn’t stand it!