HOME HINTS

The best way to practice tiling skills is to begin by covering just a small area such as a washbasin splash back, where setting out the tiles so that they are centered on the area concerned is a simple job and there is a very little tile cutting to do. For a larger area – a whole wall, or perhaps even a complete room – exactly the same techniques are used. The big difference is the sheer scale of the job, which makes the preliminary setting-out by far the most important part. The problem is that walls are seldom blank surfaces, and there may be a number of obstacles to tile around. Care must be taken to get the best fit around them with these inflexible tile squares, without needing to cut impossibly thin silvers to fill in gaps. The most important thing to do is to plan precisely where the whole tiles will fall.

On a flat, uninterrupted wall this is quite easy, simply find the center line of the wall and plan the tiling to start from there. However, there will probably be obstacles such as window reveals, door openings and built-in furniture in the room, all competing to be the center of attention, and it will be necessary to work out the best ‘centre point’ while all the time trying to avoid having very thin cut tile borders and edges. It is best to use a device called a tiling gauge a batten marked out in tile widths to work this out. The gauge is easy to make from a straight piece of timber about 1.2 m long, marked off with pencil lines to match the size of the tile. Use this to ensure that the tiles will be centered accurately on major features such as window reveals, with a border of cut tiles of equal width at the end of each row or column of tiles.