Another tiling one!

EHL123

Sorry! I realise there's already a 5 page thread but a lot of the info is quite old.

The floor to be tiled is a 5.5m x 4m rectangle, so 22sqm in total. It'll be a completely empty rectangular room with no obstacles/units to work around, just tiling wall-to-wall (newly knocked-through kitchen diner - kitchen will be fitted after the floor). The suspended timber floor will be levelled and ply'd by the builders ready for tiling, so no prep work to do. The tiles are 30x45cm 10mm-thick porcelain and we'd like them laid brick-style.

We had our bathroom tiled a few months ago and that guy quoted £880 (inc. materials) which works out at £40 a sqm. He said it would take him one day if he started early. Originally we'd planned to use him but then he made a right hash of the bathroom so we'll need to go elsewhere. Looking at some of the other threads on here it seems £880 might have been a bit steep anyway (we're in a cheap area of Scotland so no inflated London prices or anything). I called a couple of local guys but they weren't willing to give me a price over the phone because understandably they all want to look at the room. Problem is the room doesn't actually exist yet because the wall isn't getting knocked down until the summer! All I need is a ballpark figure so we know what to budget. My mum just paid someone £20 sqm to do her conservatory (so that'd work out at £440 for our job), but she lives 300 miles away so that doesn't help much :rotfl:. I hoped I'd be able to get a sqm price over the phone just to give us an idea, but it seems not. So I thought I'd try here!

Thanks

Oldsoak

If you get a sqm price it will work out as you have calculated but £25-£30m2 is usual. However it would take about 2 days, 5 bags of addy and 10Kg of grout, so it depends on if the porcelain is light or dark. (grey add is cheaper than white). If I were pricing it in my area it would be around £250 labour plus £100-£130 materials, so total cost for a job price would be £350-£380 including materials.
Having said all that it depends on local cost for daily labour.
Good luck.

EHL123

Thanks Oldsoak, that's really helpful :beer:
The tiles are a caramel colour and the guy has recommended 'mapei ultracolour caramel grout' at £10 per bag and 'mapei flexi adhesive' at £20 a bag (just going on what he's scribbled down!), so you're spot on with the material costs. I don't mind buying the materials myself as long as I know how much to buy, so maybe I should make this clear at the outset and just ask for the labour cost? I'm sure the tilers must have a rough idea of what their day rate or sqm price would be, maybe it was not knowing the cost of materials that put them off quoting anything over the phone.

We got an amazing deal on the tiles anyway - I've been lusting after them for months but they were way over budget at £35/m, so we agreed we'd only buy them if we couldn't find anything else we liked. We went to start looking at cheaper options this weekend while the sales were on but my lovely tiles were gone - turns out they've been discontinued! But the guy said he still had some sitting in his warehouse and if we bought the lot off him that day we could have them for £300 - got 26 sqm so it worked out at £11.50/m! He even delivered them for us for free. Hopefully if there aren't too many breakages we can use the extras to do the splashback in the kitchen as well. For once I didn't get moaned at for making my husband go shopping at the weekend :cool:

Oldsoak

Nice to hear someone have some good luck for a change. BTW the reason tilers don't like to quote a sqm over the phone is like this:- 1 day I did a simple tiling job in 6x6" tiles, did 20m2 no problem. Another 'small' job in a bathroom with lots of cus and angles using 600x300mm tiles on uneven surface, only manages 5m2. If I charged by the sqm first job I would have made a killing, second job would not have been very profitable at all.
Anyway, happy to be able to help.

keystone

You won't save any money by buying the addy and grout yourself. Let him do it and include in his price.

Cheers

EHL123

Keystone I'm not worried about saving money on the materials, it'd probably cost more for us to buy them anyway because we wouldn't get any trade discounts. I just thought that if I could tell them not worry about including the cost of the materials they might be more willing to give us a ballpark figure for labour over the phone so we can put enough money aside. But Oldsoak, what you've said re the sqm/day rate does make sense.

I guess I'll just have to wait until the room's ready and hope they can do the job pretty quickly once I get the quotes. I know some good tilers get booked up months in advance so the idea was to get one booked before work starts so the tiling can be done straight after the wall comes down and we can begin using the room.

I think I'll just need to set aside £800 and if there's anything left afterwards it can be a nice bonus

tpt

I know your only budgeting at the moment but be a little careful. your talking about tiling onto a wooden floor, and once the wall comes down the two floors wont be level (they never are). i noticed you said the builders would level and ply it - thats not your best or your cheapest option. Get your builders to secure the floors, bridge the gap and stop any movement, then get your tiler to use a tile backer board instead.

Ply overboarding is a bit of an old way of doing things now, and if you do this theres a good chance you'll eventually get a crack at the join point. plus you'll have to use expensive 2 part flexible adhesive, rather than cheaper single part flexi if you use a backer board.

I've recently written an article on tiling wooden floors with a DIY'r in mind, have you thought about DIYing this floor? save the £800...:j
as a new user i cant post you a link but its on my website tradepricetiles (co.uk) under the blog area. let me know if you want more help.

Tiler wise its usually £25-45, with the 45 end mostly being london area.