How to Tile a Bathroom

How to Tile a Bathroom

Introduction To Bathroom Tiling

There is almost an unlimited choice of colours, patterns and textures of bathroom tiles, bathroom tiles are the obvious choice to line the bath or shower area, but most people leave it up to the professionals. This does not need to be done as a bathroom can be tiled by anyone in a weekend, even without any previous tiling experience.

Tools For Bathroom Tiling

Before you start your tiling you will need the following tiling tools for bathroom tiling; Tile cutter, Tile saw, Grout spreader, Spirit level, Tile nibblers, Adhesive spreader, Tile cutting jig, Gauge stick (home made).
For a final touch to make your bathroom tile project look a little better you should carefully smooth off the border edges where cut with a tile sander

Preparation For Bathroom Tiling

Before you begin you bathroom tiling project, you MUST make sure the walls are clean and dry. You need to make the wall surface as smooth and flat as possible, to do this you will need to remove all flaking paint and any wallpaper that may be on the wall. Once you have your wall prepared you will want to make a start on plotting your tile position, to do this we recommend making a gauge stick to help you plot tile positions on the wall. Use a piece of wood laying several tiles along side it with a spacer between each tile, and mark off each tiles and spacers position along the stick. For more details on making a Gauge Stick please see our page Tile Layout & Preparation.

Setting Out Bathroom Tiles

Setting out the walls will depend a large amount on the size and shape of your bathroom ultimately. Work out where your bottom line of tiles will be going, mark it out and nail a temporarily thin guide batten to the tiling wall, making sure it follows the mark. To ensure your mark and guide are perfectly horizontal you should check them with a spirit level.

Measure into the center of the wall and add another mark for this, now on each side of this center mark set out rows of tiles using your gauge stick. You may need to reposition your bathroom tiles by moving them half a tiles width to the side if the ceramic border tiles measure less then half a tiles width. Once this is done you need to get your vertical line up which should be done the same as the horizontal line, using a guide batten and a spirit level to make sure they are level, once level temporarily nail to the wall.

If you have to tile around any object you should make that your starting point as this will help to keep the surrounding tiles to an equal size. By objects we mean things such as a window. As above you should use the temporary batten guide to position your row of tiles above the window. Remember, all cut tiles should be placed at the rear of the windows reveal.

For a final touch to make your bathroom tile project look a little better you should carefully smooth off the border edges where cut with a tile sander.

Vishal, representing TMEsolutions, is the webmaster for Thetiledepot, The UK's leading stockists of floor tiles, wall tiles and ceramic tiles.

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