At Tile and Stone Gallery, we firmly believe in the importance of researching before you buy, whether that be for tiles, or just a new product to add to your weekly shop! This month we’re starting a new blog series, “Top Tips for:” exploring some tips to help you choose what you need to tile different areas both inside and outside your home.
Picking tiles can be difficult; careful preparation and strong planning are key for your project to be successful. Our goal is to provide you with a better understanding, so you can confidently choose the tiles you think are best for you. In this blog, we’re going to be focusing on our top tips for the bathroom.
Use Light Colours
The colour theme of your bathroom can make one of the greatest differences, especially if your bathroom is on the smaller side. Any white or lighter tone tile will cause light to bounce from surface to surface, creating a brighter, relaxing feel, as well as creating the illusion of a more spacious area.
Use Large Format Tiles
Investing in large format tiles can be the key to cutting down your investment and making the room appear bigger. As well as this, large format tiles can be cheaper to install – It may seem obvious that buying fewer tiles will cost you less money (in both materials and labour time/costs). Luckily at Tile and Stone Gallery, this won’t narrow down your selection much as we still have many ranges in different colours to choose from.
Remember the 10% Rule
Imagine this: your tilers are finishing up the installation of your new bathroom and as they prepare to place the final tiles, you begin to run low on resources. Tiles are notorious for being tricky to work with (particularly around sinks, toilets and pipes) in busy areas, and because of this, unfortunately, can break from time to time. To tackle this problem, we’d recommend purchasing 10% more tiles than your calculations suggest, due to the practicalities of each individual bathroom project (simply put, you may have some tile wastage if you need to cut the final tile of each row to size) tile wastage may be more than you realise. If you order the extra 10% when you first order your tiles, you can be certain that your tiles are from the same batch. This is very important to know, as different batches of the same tile can have a slight variation in appearance.
The 10% rule is an easy solution to prevent a tile shortage situation like this from ever happening. All you need to do is make sure you are buying 10% extra tiles (or 15% for large format tiles) from what you believe that you need.
Use Backer Boards
Backer boards can increase the longevity of your tiles, as well as prevent many other issues you may have in the future. A good high-quality backer board will create a strong, waterproof base surface for your tiles to be applied to. They can also take the weight of heavy porcelain & natural stone tiles (which would be too heavy for skimmed plaster) giving you a much greater choice of tiles.
Use Water-Resistant Adhesives & Grouts
When installing tiles that are going to be in direct contact with water, using a water and heat resistant grout is essential. If this step isn’t done properly, it will create the perfect conditions for mildew to thrive in. So when installing new tiles, the importance of a good high-quality seal cannot be understated.
Consider Feature Tiles
Feature tiles can be a great choice for decorating your bathroom, although if used excessively they can cause a bathroom to appear messy and unstructured. Our suggestion is to use them as a vertical column, horizontal band or a single feature wall.
Hopefully, this blog has helped you understand more about choosing the right tiles for your bathroom. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next blog in this series, where we will cover some more tips for tiling different areas in your home.
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