Help! Grout and Silicon problem - bathroom just retiled

[jambourie]

Hello,

I had my bathroom retiled a couple of weeks ago. Floors were tiled with large square grey tiles with white grout and walls with white brick tiles with grey grout. There are a couple of problems with the work the tiler did:
- The grout on the floor tiles has already cracked (hairline cracks) and is crumbling away. He has tried to cover this up in some places with Silicon which does not look good.
- In the internal tile corners on the walls he has used white Silicon over grey grout, which has sort of smudged together and ended up looking dirty.
- Generally the Silicon looks messy and dirty.

I will attach some pictures to show you examples of this. Is this normal? Surely the job should be neater than this? What has gone wrong?

Is it normal that they grey grout looks darker when wet? Should he have sealed this?

Any help or advice would be really appreciated!

Thank you.

 

[jambourie]

I think he did actually rush it at the end and that's part of the problem. Bubblecraft, where he made the cuts up against the wall, the gaps between some of the tiles and the wall was almost an inch, so he used really thick grout and then tried to cover it with Silicon. I'm guessing now this isn't the right thing to do..

 

[peteablard]

Rushed all the way through IMO. Look at the cut in the floor tile round the architrave, it's way too big and you can see where the blade has overrun in each direction. No care taken at all.....
if I were you jambourie I'd make a list of everything you're not happy with and give it to the tiler hen he comes to look t it.

 

[Rookery]

Agreed its a sub-standard job. I'm sorry but the only real solution is to have it re-done. Poor workmanship, poor practices and probably poor selection of tools and materials have all contributed to this.

 

[diamondtiling]

In a nutshell...........The guy is not a tiler.

 

[prceramics]

makes me really sad to see this i am sitting at home with no work and guys out there doing this kind of work !, not acceptable

 

[stusgsx]

That is a very poor job to say the least.
How someone could actually have the front to charge for it?!
Does the guy actually advertise as a tiler?

 

[Two-Trowels]

makes me really sad to see this i am sitting at home with no work and guys out there doing this kind of work !, not acceptable

And herein lies part of the problem. Home owners get a price from a pro tiler (insert bricklayer, chippy etc as appropriate) and the price is too high so they shop around and end up with something like the above job - I've seen it loads of times with most trades. The poor pro tiler like yourself is out of work and the chancers are busy, there's no justice.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that the OP opted for a cut price cheap job (although thats what they ended up with) but I sincerely hope it didn't cost much.

 

[jwatson]

what a chancer!!!!!
if i was to list what was wrong with the job, i would be here for a long, long time.

this is totally unacceptable, IMO needs all doing again. i would try and persue any monies paid to this cowboy and tell as many people as you know stay clear. hope you get this sorted

 

[kilty55]

unfortunately this job is a rip out imo

 

[jambourie]

Actually I got a few quotes for the job and he wasn't the cheapest. He seemed to know what he was doing and he had glowing reviews on ratedpeople.com. The problem is finding a tradesman when you don't know anyone else who's had similar work done. He is coming back next week so I will list the problems and hope that he can sort it, otherwise I will have to find someone to fix it.

Thanks everyone for your help. At least now I have the confidence to confront him about it!