Bathroom Tiling & Retiling

Tiling is the part of a bathroom everybody judges and the part whose quality is decided before a single tile is picked up. Most of what separates good tiling from bad happened underneath it: whether the substrate was sound, whether the floor fell to the waste, whether the membrane was cured, and whether somebody thought about where the cuts would land.

Set-out is the whole job

A tiler who starts in a corner and works outwards will finish with a sliver of tile in the most visible place in the room. Setting out means deciding first where the full tiles land and where the cuts are forced to go, then working back from that.

In a bathroom the priority order is fairly settled. The shower wall you face is the one that has to read cleanly. Cuts belong in the corners, behind the door swing, and under the vanity. Floor and wall joints ideally line up, or are deliberately offset enough that they clearly are not trying to. A niche is centred on the tile grid rather than on the wall, because the eye reads the grout lines, not the wall.

None of that costs more in materials. It costs an hour of thinking before the adhesive is mixed.

Falls, and why retiling a floor is not cosmetic

If you are retiling a shower floor, the fall has to be right before the tiles go on, and if the existing screed does not run correctly to the waste it has to be corrected. That is why “just retile the shower” is sometimes a bigger job than it sounds: reaching the screed means the membrane above it is coming off too, and a new membrane means the wall tiles at the junction come off as well.

The alternative, tiling onto an existing floor that ponds, produces a bathroom that looks new and holds a puddle after every shower. In a humid room that puddle is not just a nuisance. It is a permanently wet grout joint.

Movement joints

Tiled surfaces move, buildings move, and the two do not move at the same rate. The standard requires flexible movement joints at internal corners, at the wall-to-floor junction, over structural joints, and at intervals across large expanses.

They are routinely left out, because a silicone joint in a corner is less attractive than a grout line and because leaving them out is invisible for a year or two. What follows is the classic failure: a line of tiles that tents or cracks along a corner, usually in the first summer, because the assembly had nowhere to go.

Grout and sealant, chosen for this climate

Grout choice matters more in Cairns than it does in a drier place, because the joints spend so much of their life damp.

Colour is the practical decision. A very light grout on a shower floor will discolour, and no sealer prevents that indefinitely. A mid tone in the wet zones and a lighter tone on the dry walls is a compromise that ages far better than a single pale grout everywhere. Where the room genuinely warrants it, an epoxy grout in the shower is effectively non-porous and will not stain, at the cost of a more demanding installation and a higher price.

Internal corners and the floor-to-wall junction are sealed with a flexible sealant rather than grouted, for the movement reasons above, and the colour is matched so the change is not obvious.

For tiling as part of a full renovation this is included in the scope. Retiling on its own is quoted after somebody has looked at what is under the existing tiles. Call 0468 047 067 or send photographs of the room through the form.