I agree with you 100% people who don't know what they are doing shouldn't be charging customers for it but on the other hand a lot of people who come on this forum complain about jobs failing because of incorrect prep, wrong materials, dot & dabbing etc. a lot of this is down to "tilers" not knowing any different and if these people find their way on to the forum would it not be more beneficial to the general public to educate these people? we have all ripped out jobs that on the face of it appear to be good jobs but then uncover 6mm plyed floors and dot & dabbed walls, with a bit more knowledge there is a good chance that these people would prep a job right and use the right materials and then you would be cursing them because ripping their work out is taking twice as long as you thought it would when you follow them 10 years later.
When I was learning to tile I was taught to use 6mm ply, prime with PVA, we never tanked a wet area, always used tubbed addy on walls. The work always looked good as and far as I know my gaffer never got a call back because of a failure. I only stumbled onto this forum when I was planning on setting up on my own and my god am I glad I did! if I hadn't then I would probably still be doing all of those things, I would have been unintentionally producing cowboy work because I would have thought it was the right way to do it.
I'm not the only one to have benefitted from the advise on this forum though because 6 months after I set up on my own I teamed up with my old boss to do 20 bathrooms in a new residential home and as far as he was concerned it was business as usual: tubbed addy, PVA for primer, no tanking and the first 2 we were due to start were only plastered the day before. I told him I didn't want to try and tell him how to suck eggs but it was all wrong and explained it all to him and thankfully he listened and we left the rooms for 2 weeks to dry out properly, he changed the primer and the addy and talked to the site manager about tanking (he didn't listen though).
granted I spent the best part of a month staying up until stupid o'clock in the morning reading through old threads to educate myself before I posted anything at all but if I had joined the forum , posted a stupid question or given bad advice and had a load a aggressive answers calling me every name under the sun I probably wouldn't have logged in again and carried on with my cowboy ways simply because that's the way I was taught and I didn't know any better.
Everybody wants to improve the trade and I think everyone can improve it a tiny bit by simply telling everybody that comes onto the forum how to do the job better and some of these people will start producing good work and there will be a few less customers getting ripped off. I think a lot of people think that the cowboys who don't do the job properly know exactly how to do the work right and choose not to but I think there are a lot more people who just need educating on the error of their ways.
