Newbie with lots of tiling to do.

27col

I thought that concrete took about 28 days to reach full strength. Not months.

andyhop

27col wrote: »

I thought that concrete took about 28 days to reach full strength. Not months.

2 weeks per inch

The way new build timber frames are thrown up it could have sat with a couple of inches of water sat into during the curing stage

SilverSix

andyhop wrote: »

When was the floor slab poured

I would expect a new build to take months after completion to fully set

IIRC the foundations went in at the end of July.

I can ask and see what the on site tiler uses, I heard somebody mention something about latex, would that be more flexible or better suited?

I hear what you are saying about the concrete fully setting though considering you could opt to have the developer tile for you it must be alright to tile on otherwise they would constantly be coming back to patch up.

Edit: Downstairs is exterior brick with a 100mm cavity and then breeze blocks, then another small cavity and plaster board. Upstairs is metal stud & plaster board so it's not timber framed.

keystone

BennyC wrote: »

The tiles are ceramic, nothing too fancy from B&Q and the adhesive is their Uni-bond rapid set. The tiles are 200x300mm.

OK so you will be able to use a standard cutter. If they were porcelain you'd be needing a wet cutter and sealing them before laying. Take the Unibond back and get some Mapei or BAL.
Get it from a specialist tiling shop NOT from a shed and tell them exactly what you want it for. 28 days is a sort of industry standard. Cement based substrates such as concrete cannot be subject to shrinkage if you are tiling over them as cracked tiles will result. That can be expensive to sort. Luckily the OP isn't using large format tiles as the larger the tiles the more critical this is.

Cheers

SilverSix

Thanks, is the Unibond stuff really that bad? I can ring B&Q and cancel/exchange it if need be. I will have a Topps Tiles just down the road from the house if they stock a more suitable adhesive?

http://www.diy.com/diy/jsp/bq/nav.jsp?action=detail&amp;fh_secondid=9277233&amp;fh_location=//catal!!!1/en_GB/categories<{9372013}/categories<{9372031}/categories<{9372100}/specificationsProductType=adhesives

From memory this is what we ordered.

Could somebody explain why Bal and Mapei adhesives would be better?

keystone

Could somebody explain why Bal and Mapei adhesives would be better?

They just are. Its a bit like comparing Bargain and Quick own brand cheapo gloss paint with Dulux Trade.

Cheers

grizzly1911

I have never laid floor tiles but I have done wall tiles.

With regard to the spacers I tend to locate a few, small numbers in the same plane as the tiles and pushed below the tile level and for the vast majority put them in at 90 degrees, a bit like pins, one on each side.

The main reason being that you can take them out when dried. I have found that if laid in the same plane you don't always get a desirable amount of grout over them, or a bit sticks up too much.

Just a thought.

Horseunderwater

Did you say you were tiling into hall WC and Utility as well? Are the doorways nice and lined up? Something to consider is doing a set of lines linking all the rooms as one, so that each one has a straight line through into the next room and so on. It's not just about doing a cross in middle of the kitchen. If you want uniformity, you need to think of the whole look. That way you will get whole tiles in middle of doorways and offcuts to fit to edges and it will all look like it has been done in one go. Hope that helps.

Assegai

With you going into the wc and hall i would also do a dry run from the kit door as that way you can see how it will run through the hall as that will be the first place anyone sees. What might be a perfect cut in the kitchen could end up being an unsightly small joint in the hall way. Try a full tile in the doorway and a half tile and see what ends up working best. The pattern you have picked should work well in terms of allowing you different options.