Wall and Floor Tiling Advice for Kate the Mate

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Went to look at this job for Kate today. Most of it has been taken off now and as luck would have it the PVA was mixed so strong it has come away from the plaster with the adhesive. I think its about 2-1 as you can almost peel it off like sunburn!

I will be putting in a price to finish the bathroom completely and hopefully (subject to acceptance) we can bring a happy ending to another poor quality job.

I have some other pics to upload and will do those later on.
 
Well done Scottley, I thought that the walls looked clean, do TF proud and bring Kate a happy ever after 🙂
 
Now Im going to chip in, I was totally disqusted by the so called workmanship that Kate was subjected to here. Its no easy job to tell any tiler his work basically is way below par, even little me has the jitters once in a while doing this task. Kate stood her ground and she was well armed, and it turned out ok. How many others on here have we seen where they have paid the so called tiler in full, because of intimidation tatics that these cowboys use? There is a myth that anyone can tile, and its exactly that a myth, Ive got rid of more so called tilers than Ive retained because they think they know what they doing they talk the talk but cant walk the walk. Its been a costly exercise, and a never ending story.
I want to thank this forum for educating people, not just the newbies, but everyone, there is a pool of experience from professionals on here, so tonight Im raising my glasses to you all.

Pebbs
 
I'll drink to that Pebbs. There is the 'correct way' of tiling and the 'cheap way'. Sometimes the rogues have silver tongues and sweet talk their victims into parting with their money. Other times the customer does the research and does everything right and they still end up with a rouge tiler or builder or whatever. In business you can get a well paid job because you have 2 or 3 A4 sized pieces of paper that you have copied of the internet. These are called 'CV's' and lots of managers take them on face value. How many customers turn to Yellow pages thinking that whoever advertises their business must be legit. I've been taken in by a locksmith that stated no callout charge and I ended up paying over £200 for a £10 lock! Kate, you have done really well to stand your ground. Tilers Forums has done the tiling industry proud. Cheers Sean
 
From what Kate said it certainly wasnt a pleasant experience with this guy so she did well to to stick up to him. Its all very well being fore armed with the knowledge of how it should be done but to actually do it takes some doing. I think his problem in the main i he was just didnt appreciate how bad the job was. His general attention to detail was poor all over. The bath for example has a centre wall mounted tap, or rather it should have a centre tap, except the bath it aound 15mm off centre. The brick bond on the floor tile was 10mm off bond on every course, unfortuately Kate hadnt noticed that bit..oops.
 
I just want to say thanks to this forum for all your help, and especial thanks to Scottley for coming out of his way to look at my bathroom yesterday and for identifying even more mistakes than I had seen originally! It has taken a long time to renovate our house and I really wanted the bathroom to look fabulous, so my heart sank last week when I saw the quality of the work being done. Without the moral support I received from this forum I don't know if I could have fought my corner so I'm extremely grateful that I came here for advice, and it's heartwarming to know that there are honest and caring tradesmen about. Thanks again everyone.
 
It comes down to lazyness and or poor skills on the tilers part for not getting an even layout. He probably wanted to save time by only cutting one side. Also looks like he forgot his glasses when he spaced those tiles.
Hope it all gets sorted out for you.
 
Kate the mate said:
Martyn, I know he used 'no more ply' but no idea what he used to stick them down. I only noticed this small strip when I looked at the pictures. The untiled area is where the shower is due to go.

Oh, another thing. He tiled behind the towel rail through the bars!! And the horrible looking things on the tissue on the floor are his used tea bags!
Click to expand...



Did he lay that floor? It looks like 6mm ply or maybe its backer boards but its on floorboards which is not good.
 
Its NMP Dom, not very well put down either but Ive suggested we leave the floor. If it fails in the future we can address that then.
 
Update on my bathroom. Spent yesterday using an axel grinder to get all of the remaining adhesive off the tiles. It was a hard old job and thought I would have a long soak in the bath afterwards. It was only then that we noticed that the bath isn't level, it tilts downwards away from wall (and the plug hole) so I had to bale out a pool of water which wouldn't go down the plug hole!

PB110128.jpg
 
great pic kate, welcome to our world,
bath should be easy to jack up now you have the tiles off
 
Kate the mate said:
Update on my bathroom. Spent yesterday using an axel grinder to get all of the remaining adhesive off the tiles. It was a hard old job and thought I would have a long soak in the bath afterwards. It was only then that we noticed that the bath isn't level, it tilts downwards away from wall (and the plug hole) so I had to bale out a pool of water which wouldn't go down the plug hole!

View attachment 20065
Click to expand...



:lol:.. messy job hey..


And get the bath levelled up..
 
Dont worry Kate ill sort the bath out as well.


Here are some pics i took whilst it was there
DSC02179 (900x1200).jpgDSC02181 (900x1200).jpgDSC02178 (900x1200).jpg
You can see how storng a pick of PVA he used, it came off like sun burn. The others show the bit the KAte hadnt noticed and that was the alleged brickbond that was 1/4" out over 3 courses.
 
Such a shame really but at least you are on the job now and so so pleased it will get done right..

Thanks for sorting this out..🙂
 
Sean Kelly said:
Kate, I used to watch 'LOST' on the TV. I could not wait till the next episode. Your thread of 9 pages comes very close to 'LOST'. I'm sure you would win 'Thread of the Month' (if there were such a competition!). So many people start a really interesting thread and we never get the follow-ups. Well done for keeping us upto date on proceedings. You are probably enjoying a nice glass of wine now, so I'll leave you to it. Good luck with the rest of the project. Maybe you should keep those slithers of tiles and mount them on some perspex. You could maybe put the perspex over the toilet as a little reminder of what your bathroom could have ended up looking like! Cheers Sean
Click to expand...

We used to have one but it got confusing with all the other comps lol. We used to be able to vote on threads and each month one won.
 
Don't know why but I've not been following this thread at all so have just caught up with it. Shocking job. I'm gutted to hear the 'find a tiler' thing on here didn't work out and you ended up with this bloke. We'll have to work on that somehow.

Glad scottley got to it in the end. It'll be done right now for sure.

The bailing the last bit of water out of the bath had me in stitches, nearly spilt my brew on yet again another keyboard! haha
 
I'd be keen to see the finished article.

As for PVA, the number of builders, bathroom fitters etc who assume PVA can be used without a problem never ceases to amaze me.

I will say one thing for PVA though - it makes getting the tiles off FAR easier. I stripped a bathroom out a couple of years ago to convert into a wet room. The tiles came of in SHEETS! The grout was holding them together. The bond on the grout was stronger to that holding the tiles to the wall.

When the walls were inspected, you could see the shiny surface all over them where the adhesive had not made contact - PVA!
 
Don't mind me while I bump some old but popular threads to see if the topic is still active in some way. Wondering if either the original idea or original issue still exists. I've done this with quite a few threads, so don't be offended if this is just jargon these days and not applicable. But I thought there might be a small chance a small percentage of the small number of threads might just be slightly applicable and the thread could get a new lease of life.

Reply to this if you've read a bit and have something to say. 🙂
There IS going to be a bigger chance when i do this, that the thread is dead. So don't worry if that's the case, just don't reply to it, and we'll all move on and let the thread drop out of view again.
 
Just bumping some of the older popular (sometimes not so popular) threads. Probably wont be current discussion these days but I just need to do it. So just ignore the thread if it's not current for you.
 

There are similar tiling threads here

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Wall and Floor Tiling Advice for Kate the Mate
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