UK Floor tiling 600x600 48m2

Hello, this is my first post here, but I have been doing some reading.

I am going to be tiling the whole ground floor of our house. We already have the tiles, they are Porcelain 600x600x7mm tiles.

See the picture below. This shows all the full tiles and cut tiles. I will start with the first tile at the mid point of the entrance to the kitchen and centre of the hallway (shown by the blue line). The floor currently has engineered wood floor boards (in most areas) on top of the original (10 year old house) block and beam concrete floor. The existing concrete floor is flat and sound. The kitchen area (with the bay window) has existing tiles which I'll remove, as does the downstairs loo (room under the stairs).

I have a few questions:

1. I'm assuming I don't need any matting (the existing tiles in the kitchen/downstairs loo don't have matting)
2. I'm confused by the notches I need in the trowel. With a 600x600 tile it seems that a 10mm notch is OK. Is that correct?
3. Adhesive choices are a minefield! Do I get quickset, or standard? We will be living in the house as the work is done so I'd imagine something that sets quicker would be ideal, but not essential. What are the pro's and con's?
4. I've going to get a manual cutter of the many straight cuts and use a grinder with a diamond disk for the tricker parts. Any reason to hire a wet cutter?
5. Any other advice?
6. I had a quote to do this job and it came in at over £3K just for labour - hence I'm doing it myself.

Thanks in advance!

That's £62.50 per meter was that without the adhesive and grout?

Where one room meets another you should have an expansion strip so ideally with that kinda layout you need a grout line bang on under where a door would sit in two places.

Both the doors from the hallway, to the large room and the otger smaller area. Then check what the cuts look like with that setup and go from there.

You then leave a grout joint empty and I think use silicon in matching colour but you don't fill it.

There are proper expansion strips from the likes of www.shluter-systems.co.uk and as you only need One 3m length it might be worth the investment instead of doing it with silicone or resin or whatever.

Needs to be able to give as each room heats and cools separate and each has their own heat cycles and not always match. It'd be where a crack would appear 10 years down the road.

The other option if that version setting out doesn't work is then to tile as per your set out and cut an extra expansion strip and use a Schluter one still. Won't make the tiling look worse at all your eyes still follow the large squares and their groutlines.

(Will get to your questions don't worry)

Thanks for the quick reply Dan!

There aren't any doors between the hallway, kitchen and living room (just doorways) so the entire downstairs is always one temperature. Would that mean we can get away without expansion joints?

Oh, and yes, that was just labour, no materials.

I have an extra question to go with those in my original post. Can I use adhesive directly on top of the concrete (or maybe it is screed) floor?

10 year old house block and beam with cement screed.
Are there any cracks in the sub floor?
Is it a pattern tile?
Belt and braces is uncoupling membrane first!
I don’t think 48sq mts is a DIY project.
10mm trowel and back butter tiles.
You should stay with a standard set adhesive . Unless you are confident on fixing larger areas within 30 minutes!

Thanks for the reply.

Yep, block and beam. And what looks like screed (with no cracks)

Tiles don't have a pattern. Thanks for info on adhesive and the trowel.

TimelessJohn said:

10 year old house block and beam with cement screed.
Are there any cracks in the sub floor?
Is it a pattern tile?
Belt and braces is uncoupling membrane first!
I don’t think 48sq mts is a DIY project.
10mm trowel and back butter tiles.
You should stay with a standard set adhesive . Unless you are confident on fixing larger areas within 30 minutes!

Click to expand...

Follow up question..

I am looking at ProTilerTools for adhesive and it asks the size of the trowel. If I put 10mm in here (screenshot below) it says I need 9x 20Kg bags, but I assume it is not accounting for back buttering. How many additional bags should I add to cover that?