Wall Tiling in Bromley & South London

Wall tiling covers most of what I do day to day: bathroom walls, shower enclosures, kitchen splashbacks, utility rooms, cloakrooms and the occasional fireplace or porch.

Preparation comes first

A tiled wall is only as good as what is behind it. Plasterboard needs to be sound, fixed at the right centres and primed. Fresh plaster needs to be fully dry and sealed before anything goes on it. Old tiles, adhesive and wallpaper all have to come off properly rather than be tiled over.

In a shower or wet area the wall needs tanking. Tile and grout are not a waterproof layer on their own, and a shower wall that has not been tanked will eventually let water through to the substrate behind it. That work is invisible in the finished room, which is exactly why it gets skipped.

Setting out

Before anything is fixed I work out where the full tiles land and where the cuts go. The aim is to avoid thin slivers in visible corners, keep cuts balanced either side of a window or a shower tray, and line courses through with the things people actually look at: the top of a bath, a worktop, a window reveal, the edge of a niche.

Walls are rarely plumb and corners are rarely square, particularly in older houses, so some of that discrepancy has to be absorbed deliberately, in the places it will show least.

Finishing

Neat cuts around sockets, pipework, shower valves and brassware make more difference to how a room reads than the tile itself. Internal corners, external edges and the junction with the bath or tray all need the right trim or silicone rather than grout, because those are movement joints and grout will crack in them.

Getting a quote

I cover Bromley, Croydon, Orpington, Bexley, Swanley, Sevenoaks and the surrounding South London area. Free, no-obligation quotes, and clean and tidy work throughout.