First time with travertine

[wetdec]

I would go for the best strength on the floor. dont compromise with travertine as the natural flaws in the stone are the weakest points and cud crack if floor flex is too much. Also I wud use white powder addy as grey can bleed through the stone and stain and gets into the pores and shows when you grout. Dont use slate seal its more like a varnish. you need something to penetrate into the stone to seal prior to grout then as is a bathroom maybe a waterproofing oil finish with a satin wax and buff for a nice but not too gloosy shine....good luck

This is gr8 advice but on the sealing side you will struggle because of the resin you will find they might not take. I am guessing its a noce or wallnut travertine ??


tiler

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[silver]

Hi,
The guys have already covered all your backerboard, adhesive, grout, seal issues......
On a recent trav job I did........the b/reg weight restrictions were an issue. The walls were all skimmed and the weight of 1m2 of the nice trav they had bought exceeded the 16kg/m2 guide for skimmed plaster ability. They insisted they wanted the trav.......so they took all the newly boarded and skimmed walls down in their bathroom extention and reboarded with the HARDIBACKER board. Problem solved...almost
I then found a problem that you may wish to check out yourself. ?
Where the builder had reboarded onto the wall batons....putting a straight edge across the walls either side of the door (there was no architrave on)found they didnt run with the straight edge. One side slightly kicked into the room...hence the straight edge left the wall on the other side of the door. This meant that somewhere when you travel up the wall from either side of the door...above the door would result in a mega proud edge to a tile butting upto the next one......I tried really hard to explain this to my customer that tiles dont bend .....it aint like wallpaper ! etc and somewhere a "twist" would be apparent to accommodate this error. But they thought it didnt matter cuz I wasnt tiling the door space ! I got there in the end and the builder was able to pull in the board by removing a levelling wedge from behind the baton.
The same situation can obviously happen around the windows.
In most of my jobs the door / frame is up into a corner of the room not centre to the wall so cutting in the tiles accomodates slight wall mis alignments.
I know we all check out these things whilst measuring up........but the bigger the tiles and with engineered edges the sightest "proud" will be obvious etc.....and its bad enough with trav the first time. Hope I have helped even a little ?

The first time with trav or any other "different" tile to ceramic is always a bit of a "ring clencher" ! I know how I felt so take your time...steady away...step by step and I am sure you will be fine. It will be a bonus in your porfolio.